The Washington Post's ombudsperson Andrew Alexander has an apology to make. He's super sorry that the Post doesn't do a better job exposing its readers to government data:

[T]he era when paper records were kept in dusty file rooms is fading. Today, "freedom of information" has been expanded to encompass the right to instantly tap vast quantities of public information in electronic form. The contents of these databases, from restaurant health inspection reports to toxic waste citations, help citizens improve their communities and their lives.

The Post has a journalistic obligation and a business imperative to provide easy online access to the data through its Web site. But it's fallen far behind at a time when its readers have a growing number of alternatives.

It's intriguing that some people within the Washington Post enterprise are interpreting the organization's mission these days as being a portal onto minimally-processed government data, and doing it with a thinly-veiled reference to the good ol' days of Watergate. That's reinterpreting "newspaper" to be a news organization, yes. But it's also rethinking "news organization" to include acting as a go-between between the stuff that government produces and the stuff that citizens might like to know about. But hey, as Alexander points out, today kicks off Sunshine Week across the country. No time like the present to start getting better at serving up to readers the source materials of government.

If not for the good of the country, then for the good, says Alexander, of the Post:

The Post should help its readers by becoming a robust online gateway to digitized information. If not, readers' loyalties will shift to another brand.

'There is a theory among some in sports that SportsCenter has had this terrible impact on the fundamentals of sports because they highlight slam dunks and fancy passes,' explains Pfeiffer. 'The current media culture doesn't reward getting things done in government. It rewards saying the most outlandish things.'

-- The White House's communications director Dan Pfeiffer explains the Obama administration's "theory of how the news media work in this Internet age" in a Time magazine article.

Credit:RadarOnline

Point proven? Above the Law traces the origins of the John Roberts retirement rumor that spread about the Internet yesterday back to a Georgetown Law professor who floated the fake news as part of a class lesson on how what seem like credible sources might actually turn out to be engaging in somewhat questionable pedagogy! ABT quotes a 1L in the professor's class:

Today’s class was partially on the validity of informants not explaining their sources. [Professor Tague] started off class at around 9 am EST by telling us not to tell anyone, but that we might find it interesting that tomorrow, Roberts would be announcing his retirement for health concerns. He refused to tell anyone how he knew. Then, at around 9:30, he let everyone in on the joke.

The time between the prof's dropping of the Roberts retirement "news" and a posting of the rumor on Radar? ("EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Considering Stepping Down.") Ten minutes. The time between when the professor let his kids in on the ruse and a Radar retraction? Six minutes. You almost get whiplash. Seems like the good professor might have wanted to institute a no-texting/no-emailing/no-iPhone/no-Blackberry rule before running his little classroom experiment.

Now some tech apologists might take a look at that episode and say "what's the problem?" The rumor was floated, shot down, and corrected within an hour. What's the damage, really? It'd be interesting to hear from Roberts whether he, in his heart of hearts, sees some sort of long-term and lasting ill effects from the gossip. It seems likely that part of the evolution of this wild and crazy news world is that we'll all learn to be more incredulous about things that seem farfetched, even if they are marked "exclusive." We learned that much from the whole Perez Hilton/Fidel Castro mess, didn't we? But really, it's tough to draw much more meaning from this little case study than the fact that (1) 1Ls are guilible and that (2) the good folks at Radar, who consider themselves journalists, should really think twice about considering "my professor told us in class this morning" a hard and fast source.

The silver lining of all this, though, is that #radarheadlines was a pretty funny Twitter meme while it lasted -- which was all of a few hours.

"After President John F. Kennedy spoke to the nation about the Cuban missile crisis, in October, 1962, 'the networks immediately went to their normal programming.'" That's the New Yorker's Ken Auletta, quoting historian Michael Beschloss, in meaty piece (subscription/purchase only) about what it means to be a President of the United States and to run a White House in a media environment where Kennedy's message to the country about the face off with the Soviet Union would be followed, in seconds, by a flood of TV and web commentary. Auletta describes the web-driven information world where the idea of news "cycles" has been largely replaced by a broad and unceasing river of information. It's well, well worth breaking away from Twitter and Facebook to give Auletta's New Yorker piece on the Obama White House and the media a read.

The picture Auletta paints is particularly good context for an idea we mentioned earlier today: that the White House's rollout of a two-way YouTube component around Wednesday night's State of the Union makes sense as part of a broader attempt by the Obama administration to find its footing in that stream -- something that Auletta's piece suggests that this White House well knows it has to do, and do soon. The reaction to the Great Return of David Plouffe has been mostly overheated. But where it does seem significant is where be accompanied by the same sort of White House savvy in understanding how news stories and media narratives evolve today as we saw in the Obama campaign.

(If you only have a few seconds to spare before you move on to the next chunk of information, and want to get a quick lay of the land, zero on on the section in Auletta's piece about the frenzied work-day flow NBC's Chuck Todd.)

A deeply-rooted feel for the unique shape of modern "news," for lack of a better and more inclusive word, is a characteristics that the Obama White House hasn't demonstrated nearly as strongly as the Obama campaign did. Auletta runs through Obama's Philadelphia race speech and its subsequent YouTube virality, the campaign's nuanced reaction to the Clinton campaign's attacks, and other greatest hits from Obama campaign's smart negotiation of the information landscape in the 2008 race. Of course, the conditions have been much different, and arguably much more difficult. But it's worth something that the embodiment of the Obama campaign's approach to world of information might have been campaign manager Plouffe, and in the Obama administration, it's been White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Here's Auletta:

"The press office has an adjunct in Rahm Emanuel, who is unusually active in the media. 'He sees it as a political strategy,' Peter Baker says. 'He's as relentless in working reporters as he is in working congressmen. He cajoles, lobbies, berates, and trades information, because he understands it's better to work the media than to shut us out."

"Working the media" isn't what it once was, and that approach, while perhaps winning some positive commentary in some established outlets, arguably hasn't served the White House all that well. Give Auletta's piece a read to more deeply understand why it hasn't.

Sure, it's the New York Times' digital division that gets New York Magazine photo spreads worthy of Hollywood starlets. (Headline: "The Renegades at the New York Times," and I'm assuming I'm not the only one picturing programmers arriving to work at the Times brandishing swords and some sort of face-obscuring masks.) But their colleagues to the south at the Washington Post aren't willing to cede the web so quickly. Check out this new widget on Obama Administration appointments, tracking the 486 Senate-approved positions the new president has to fill. Just 6.7% of the jobs, notes the widget, have been filled thus far. Note the adorably teensy pie charts showing which federal agencies have the most open posts, and the useful gender, ethnicity, age, and connections breakdowns. (You'll be surprised to learn, for example, that 10 of the 43 appointees confirmed thus far either attended Obama's alma mater of Harvard or taught there.) A widget like this might not immediately smack of journalism, but it is a powerful way to tell a cumulative, evolving political story like presidential appointments that's a bit more difficult to serve with the traditional lede-nutgraf-body-kicker article format.

What happens when Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler put their giant brains together? Media Cloud, it seems. The new project from the Berkman Center aims to inject some actual data at the the "Is the Internet kryptonite to the news business?" debate. (Oh, those Berkman Center kids, what with their research and evidence and inductive reasoning.) Some of Berkman's driving questions mirror key questions in online politics. Are political bloggers breaking news stories or merely feeding off the decaying carcass of traditional media? Does the disaggregation of news leaving gaping holes in what we now know about corruption, legislation, and public policy? The debate about the future of political media is nearly unintelligible without answers to those questions.

Enter Media Cloud...

Check out Perspctv:An exploration of internet activity in reference to mainstream media. Gain a unique Perspctv on the US Presidential Elections.

This project presents different perspectives in our world, including that of Mainstream media and user-generated content on the Internet. Explore the similarities and the disparities, hear the many voices that have emerged and choose which view, if any, makes the most sense to you. What we think vs. what they say we think -- All the chatter on the Internet, all the traditional news media coverage, and all the pollsters -- Perspctv brings it all together in a simple and elegant manner -- and gives a unique "dashboard" picture of the elections at any one given moment in time, totally un-biased.