No surprises in Mass.

No live blogging tonight, except to observe that rumors of Hillary Clinton’s and Mitt Romney’s demise in Massachusetts were greatly exaggerated. My record of making predictions is pretty grim, but I’ll give myself a mild pat on the back for this. I’ll have further thoughts on the media and Super Tuesday in the Guardian tomorrow afternoon.

News is a (nasty) conversation

The participatory model of journalism is one of the more interesting experiments taking place in news these days. But it’s got a downside. Adam Gaffin posts this item about the comments sections being shut down at three local GateHouse weeklies — the Somerville Journal, the Swampscott Reporter and, now, the Cambridge Chronicle.

It’s a shame, but I’m not surprised. Sooner rather than later, news orgs are going to have to move away from allowing anonymous and pseudonymous comments and instead require people to post under their real names. Right now, no editor dares to take that step on the theory that the comments will disappear. But it has to happen.

Busy editors and reporters don’t have time to monitor every anonymous comment as it comes in. This isn’t about technology; it’s about common sense. Letters to the editor are rarely published without the writer’s name attached. If anything, online comments, which are posted automatically and without editing, ought to be held to a higher standard.

Pictures from a polling place

I got back from voting a little while ago. While I was there, I took a few pictures to upload to the Polling Place Photo Project, started by Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net and now hosted by the New York Times.

I zipped off four photos to the project, which you can see here. (At right is Salem News reporter Ethan Forman, who’s interviewing a voter outside Danvers High School.) The idea is to supplement election coverage with a little citizen journalism, combining professional with amateur contributions. When it comes to photography, I certainly qualify as an amateur.

Here is Rosen’s original essay on the purpose of the project.

The site is slow today — no surprise, given that it’s Super Tuesday. I imagine things will be quite a bit busier later today, when people start getting out of work.

Rosen and the other folks behind the project hope this will somehow lead to a better voting experience. Perhaps. Certainly there’s a possibility that some real problems will be documented by camera-wielding citizens.

If nothing else, though, the project shows that professional and amateur journalists can work together to produce something that’s both interesting and worthwhile.

30 years ago this week

I hadn’t thought much about the 30th anniversary of the Blizzard of ’78 until I saw Tom Gagen’s op-ed piece in today’s Globe, in which he describes the futile efforts to put out a paper the morning after.

Gagen brought back my own memories of trying to publish a paper that night. I was an editor at the Northeastern News, and we had two sports reporters — Steve Silva and Mike Tempesta — at the Beanpot. By all rights, Steve and Mike should have been trapped at the Boston Garden. But the editor, Anthony Pastelis, and I implored them to come back after the game, insisting we were going to get that week’s edition out one way or another.

Somehow, Steve and Mike managed to walk back to Northeastern, arriving in the newsroom at 2 or 3 a.m. and looking like frozen snowmen. We put the finishing touches on the paper. But later that morning, when we got in touch with our compositor/printer — the Boston Phoenix — we were told that it wasn’t going to happen. I’m not sure it would have mattered if the Phoenix’s printing plant was right down the street, but the fact that it was in Auburn, in Central Massachusetts, made our hopes of getting a paper out impossible.

These days, of course, we’d have just published the paper online and that would have been that.

Amnesty is back

When John McCain complained that a Mitt Romney advertisement had characterized McCain’s program for dealing with illegal immigrants as “amnesty,” Romney denied it. “I don’t call it amnesty,” said Romney. McCain, though, was telling the truth. Romney, well, wasn’t.

Now Romney has a new Internet-only ad out comparing McCain to Hillary Clinton. And guess what? The ad criticizes McCain for supporting “amnesty.” Somehow I don’t think Romney will deny it this time.

Inspired to be wired

If you scroll down the right-hand column of this blog, you will eventually come to a graphic I posted last week for Wired Journalists. The site, started recently by Ryan Sholin, Howard Owens and Zac Echola, is a social network for journalists who are interested and involved in changing the way news organizations do business. The mission statement opens thusly:

WiredJournalists.com was created with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind.

Our goal is to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st Century role.

You don’t need the best equipment, the biggest budget or even management support to accomplish worthy goals. The only requirement is a willingness to learn and a mind open to new ways of thinking about journalism.

Wired Journalists is heavily oriented toward multimedia, with journalists invited to upload their photos and videos. But it’s open to anything, and people are already forming groups about a whole range of topics. There’s also a news feed of off-site material and a central gathering point for blog posts. I’ve created a Northeastern University group, and my students in Reinventing the News will be joining this afternoon.

As of this morning, there are already 968 members, which is pretty remarkable for a site that went live just a few weeks ago.

I find the platform for Wired Journalists to be as interesting as the content. It’s built on Ning, a DIY social-network environment created by Marc Andreessen, who helped write Mosaic and Netscape lo these many years ago. One thing I’ve never quite understood about the appeal of Facebook, MySpace et al. is that they’re semi-closed environments — it’s as though everyone suddenly started pointing to the pre-Web AOL as the cool new thing.

Ning allows anyone to create his or her own social network, which strikes me as a more promising model in the long run.

More on the Mashpee land suit

Peter Kenney, here and here, offers some historical perspective on the Mashpee land suit. It’s interesting to see the name Walter Jay Skinner pop up. Skinner, who died in 2005, presided over the 1986 toxic-waste case made famous in the book and movie “A Civil Action.” I covered the trial and most of the appeals process, and was impressed with Skinner’s patience and sense of fair play.

Skinner supposedly once told one of Kenney’s sources that he’d made some mistakes in a trial that went against the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, and that if the tribe ever won official recognition — as it has — then it could bring the case again.

What does this have to do with Middleborough? What’s going on now could put the proposed casino on hold for years. Since last summer, I’ve been saying to anyone who’d listen that no casino would ever be built in Middleborough. There are just too many ways to stop it. This is one.

18-1

Good grief. My sympathies to hardcore Patriots fans, who invested far more in this team than I did. The Pats — and especially the offensive linemen — were thoroughly outplayed from beginning to end. What a game. It really looked like it was over at 14-10, didn’t it? You never know.

Microsoft’s Yahoo bet

The headline at Wired.com says it all: “Microsoft Bids for Yahoo: Do Two Losers Make a Winner?” And if you read Betsy Schiffman’s article, the answer would appear to be “no.”

Microsoft’s proposed $44.6 billion acquisition of Yahoo is the biggest media story of the still-new year. Yet news organizations seem to be straining to imbue this with the excitement they think it deserves. When it comes to the “what does it mean?” graf, everyone is coming up short. In fact, it may not mean all that much.

Carolyn Johnson writes in the Boston Globe today that this may be all about the coming cell-phone wars, where Google doesn’t have anywhere near the head start that it does on the desktop. Even here, though, Google’s efforts to develop cell-phone software — the so-called Google phone, a.k.a. the “Android” — is the subject of much excitement. Everyone wants to know if Android-enabled phones will be cooler/ cheaper/ faster than the Apple iPhone. So even if Google’s cell-phone efforts are not that far along, they’re still considerably ahead of where Microsoft and Yahoo are.

I’m hard-pressed to say how this could affect the financially struggling news business except to note that this is all about online advertising. If competition between Google and Microsoft/Yahoo somehow helps the pie grow, then that can only be good. At the Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles is asking whether Microsoft should buy Yahoo. Only 19 people had responded by this morning, and they were evenly split.

Microsoft has not been an interesting company for many years. Its success is built almost entirely on two monopoly products, Windows and Office, which have their roots in the 1980s and which came to full fruition in the mid-’90s. The company has done a nice job in recent years with its Xbox video-game systems, but that’s essentially a side project. Contrast that with the iPod, which Apple used to rekindle interest in its Macintosh computers.

Yahoo? Enormous numbers of people go there, so I guess the company is doing something worth saving. But it’s fallen way, way behind Google in online advertising, and I don’t find what it offers to be particularly innovative or compelling. (I do like Flickr, the social network for photography that Yahoo bought a couple of years ago. But Flickr users are already protesting the Microsoft takeover, which could provide a shot in the arm to Picasa, Google’s own underdeveloped photo service.) I don’t use Yahoo Mail for anything more than diverting stuff I don’t want to a mailbox I never check. By contrast, I like Google’s Gmail so much that I now use it for everything. I also use Google Calendar, Google Documents, Blogger (of course), Google Earth and several other Google services. The company’s “cloud computing” concept is taking over my life.

As Robert Guth emphasizes (sub. req.) in the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft has not been Bill Gates’ company for some time. Steve Ballmer is firmly in charge, and that will become clearer later this year, when Gates retires. Ballmer is fiercely competitive, but if he shares Gates’ vision for how to shape technology markets, he’s never really demonstrated it. (Even Gates never had much vision regarding how good software should work, a shortcoming with which tens of millions of us must contend every day.)

Let’s not forget, too, that though Yahoo and Google have both been criticized for helping the Chinese government with its efforts to censor the Internet, Yahoo went quite a bit farther — actually providing information that helped the government arrest dissidents. Its fierce competitive culture aside, Microsoft has a reputation for being socially conscious. So maybe Microsoft will curb Yahoo’s excesses. But that has nothing to do with catching up to Google, either.

This John Markoff piece in the New York Times seems to get it directionally right. Google isn’t perfect by any means. Someday, someone will come along and knock it off its pedestal. But that challenge is not likely to come from two of yesterday’s giants. Microsoft still makes a ton of money, and will for years to come. That should keep Yahoo afloat.

Still, when Google one day feels the heat, in all likelihood it’s going to come from people who today are still in college or even high school. At the Guardian, Jack Schofield offers some sound advice to Microsoft, arguing that the deal might make sense if Ballmer and company transform Yahoo into their consumer division. His conclusion: “But is Microsoft ready to take that step? I think not.”

Photo (cc) by Erwin Boogert. Some rights reserved.