Give me a break. The conspiracy nuts have "found" an image of John McCain in the opening of a Fox local newscast and are out for blood.

In the animated open, just before the anchors appear, there's a frame or two of John and Cindy McCain. Clearly either a switching error, graphics glitch, or edited in by the poster who admits he was working in Final Cut Pro, the tinfoil hat crowd has decided it's a Fox mind control trick. Never mind that subliminal advertising has never been proven to work. When you want to find evidence of corporate brainwashing, you'll find it in the oddest places.

Sadly, Occam's Razor is never enough for some people. The story is getting more than 3,000 Diggs.

So what on Earth am I doing posting this in a blog dedicated to reinvention? Because I think newsies will get as steamed as I am about it. I think many will use this as evidence of the wackjobs on the Internet and say "See! The Web is full of ignorant clowns who aren't interested in the truth!"

And I'm here to say it doesn't matter a bit.

Because in the wilderness of the Web, there is even room for the crazies. I was talking to a friend who was lamenting a chain email she got. Surely the Web is to blame. But I reminded her that chain letters go back to... more »

The last thing holding back the Internet from ubiquity is connectivity. You still need either a wired connection, a WiFi hotspot or a wireless card to be on the Web. This still gives the upper hand to cable, phone companies, satellite, radio and the established forms of transmission.

But what happens if plans for WiFi/WiMax clouds actually happen?

Big, big change.

One of two things will happen - you'll either get free or cheap access on a city wireless connection or you'll pay a company a flat fee.

Once you're truly wireless, the remaining distinctions go away. Internet radio now goes in your car. You make free Skype calls from anywhere. Cable and satellite become less necessary. With WiFi, you simply "tune in" the programs you want on a web-enabled TV. (Really, you can do this now. You just won't need the many boxes and the extra fees.) No wonder cell phone and cable companies are investing in WiMax. They have to be panicked.

Live shots for the web and TV become as easy as opening your laptop and plugging in a camera. Sending video becomes cheap. 

Will we recognize the changes ahead of time, or hang on to the old broadcasting model?

The Big Tower model thus ends, ironically, not by a cable, but by a competitor also using radio waves.

That's reinvention.

- Steve Safran, Sr. Vice President, Media 2.0 AR&D

Linking to other websites is another one of those Not Done practices in most newsrooms. This is a silly superstition, and one that doesn't grok with how the web behaves. You're hurting yourself by not linking to other sites. Ironically, the best thing you can do is link to your competition. Also - mention them a whole lot on your blogs.

Why?

Let's look back at the old practice first. You couldn't mention the other stations in town. This led to the very, very silly practice of phrases like "another station in town reported" or "at a competing station." Nobody talks like this. We are in the facts business. But somewhere along the lines, someone thought "hey - if we mention that WXXX found out something before we did, we'll never get our viewers again." The logic should have been "The audience will appreciate our honesty with them and will trust that we will always be straight with them."

Still, as everyone engaged in this nonsense, there was no real harm done. Now, with the Web, you can shoot your site in the foot(er) by this same tactic.

Why? Search.

Search engines rate sites by, among other things, the number of inbound and outbound links. Search wants to see how many people trust you - and how active you are among other sites. You're going to turn up higher in a search if you have lots of links to your site. The best way to get those links is to link out.

Also, you... more »

Five years ago this week, the iTunes Music Store opened. Since then, the music industry has been turned on, well, its ear. When you think about the things that were forbidden until they were compulsory, the legal downloading of songs was high on the list. It was impossible, until it was not.

Now you can get TV, movies (for purchase or rental), podcasts, lectures, games, and - oh yes - music at iTMS. The business has changed, for good. (And for better.)

The record labels could not - and even stranger still will not - reinvent themselves much past the album-concert tour model. (They'll even sue your baby, as Terry writes about.) But iTMS is reinventing constantly. So is LiveNation, the concert ticket seller, which has signed Madonna and Jay-Z to recording deals. Singers like Colbie Caillat can pop out of nowhere thanks to MySpace. Songs you hear tonight on American Idol will be for sale tomorrow on iTunes.

iTunes proved something else: we'll pay for digital content if it's high quality, reliable and fast. It's not true that everyone wants to steal from the web. Mostly, they steal when they don't have a better choice.

In its first week, iTunes sold more than one million songs. Since then, it has sold four billion. According to Wired, it accounts for 70 percent of all digital music sold in the world. And forget... more »

In T.H. White's "The Once and Future King," a telling of the Arthur legend, Merlin turns young Arthur (then known as "the Wart") into an ant. The Wart finds the ants to behave with an unsurprisingly hive-mind mentality. They speak in what we'd recognize as binary. Ants live a life of work. Their binary language consists of two signals: "Done" and "Not Done." Through these signals, they can inform each other of work tasks, and can form longer black-and-white phrases. The best known of these are the signs above every anthill tunnel entrance:

EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY

The society is enforced by centurion ants who can't think for themselves. The metaphor in this section of the story is about totalitarian societies and control. There is no room for discussion and analysis in the ant colony, only instructions and reports. You'll find other versions of this quote. Another variation on the theme is "That which is not prohibited is mandatory."And that brings us, tidily, to newsroom culture where it seems that adopting the culture of the Web is often forbidden... until it's compulsory.

Think of every major development in online information in the past decade, and you'll find that news's reaction to it was to forbid it first, then require it:

• Having news on a website instead of just promotional information
• Scooping your own newscast by publishing a story online first
• Blogging
• Putting video on YouTube
• Creating original pieces for the Web

And so on. It's all impossible until... more »

MediaReinvent fave Mark Glaser has an excellent report on The Smoking Gun, the longtime site that has done some of the best online journalism all along - simply by posting unfiltered legal and police documents. TSG recognized early on (11 years ago, to be precise) that the Web audience didn't need finished news - it craved raw data and information. By posting mugshots, police reports and other basic information, the site is compelling and often has "why didn't I think to do that?" journalism. Writes Glaser:

In a world of social network widgets, videoblogs and Web 2.0 gewgaws, sometimes it’s the simple things that work best. That’s the lesson of Web 1.0 startup The Smoking Gun, a simply designed site that relies on public documents and criminal mugshots to bring in boatloads of traffic.

If a prominent politician or celebrity has run afoul of the law, chances are good that The Smoking Gun will have a mugshot, lawsuit brief or other document to provide the gory details. New York governor Elliot Spitzer caught with a prostitute? They have her photos. NBA star Carmelo Anthony busted for drunk driving? They have the mugshot. Google Street View cameras going up someone’s driveway? Photos here.

more »