Police set up a barricade and kept journalists at a distance. Press badges apparently meant nothing. A rumor developed that the air space above the park had been suspended to keep news helicopters from getting any footage. This rumor was later confirmed by the CBS news desk.

But all of this is nothing compared to the allegations of violence against journalists simply trying to cover the action. A number of journalists have claimed to have been hassled and attacked by the police. During his fascinating live tweet of the action, the New York Times‘ Brian Stelter quoted a New York Post reporter as saying he was “roughed up.” Several journalists were arrested, including some from the New York Times and NPR. Twitter is full of stories of reporters being hounded, barricaded, and impeded. When one protester was injured and being wheeled away on a stretcher, a large amount of riot police made sure no one in the press could capture the moment.

During the night, as reporters struggled to do their jobs, many created a Twitter hashtag, “#mediablackout,” to collect the stories. The Huffington Post has a collection of some of the most damning accounts.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has taken full credit for the eviction, saying at a press conference that “the final decision to act was mine and mine alone.” It may seem courageous for the man to take responsibility for what could be an unpopular decision. However, that seeming courage quickly turned to cowardice when the Mayor decided America didn’t deserve to see the consequences of said decision.

(photo via AP)

It paid off. In the bottom of the ninth, with the Mets trailing the Angels by a run at Shea Stadium, a pinch-hitting Marlon Anderson drove a 3-1 pitch into right-center. The outfielder misplayed it. Anderson, not known for his baserunning, motored around the bases, meeting the tag at home plate. He smashed into the catcher, busting his lip – and forcing the game into extra innings.

In the top of the tenth, a Darin Erstad single put the Angels up a run. In the bottom of the inning, with two outs, two runners on and a full count, Cliff Floyd drove a ball over the right field fence, winning the game for the Mets.

That game in June 2005 rewarded patience – and baseball fans. Well, Mets fans anyway. It rewarded Anthony De Rosa, a New Jersey native, Rutgers grad, and Mets fan in the original sense of the term: fanatic. De Rosa outlasted several of his friends that night, watching every pitch.

At the time, De Rosa was writing regularly for MetsBlog.com; he would go on to found his own Mets blog, HotFootBlog. The guy loves the Mets, and the way he expressed his love at that point was by writing about them.

It was an offshoot, in a way, from his early days exploring the Internet. He is enough of an online veteran to draw a distinction between the old Internet, with its BBS‘s (Wikipedia is helpful on that one, youngsters) and online communities like Compuserve and Prodigy, and the Web. He particularly notes pre-Huffington, pre-Time Warner AOL – a once-dominant force that seemed determined to bring the bite-sized web in-house. That community was formative for De Rosa.

“I think the point I realized [the web] was a mass medium was when AOL came around,” De Rosa told me recently. “You started to see people use it more as a way to put up things that they were interested in. You started to see people gather around celebrities or world politics or technology…. Now the communities were dictating what was interesting to them. They were talking amongst themselves.”

An engaged De Rosa joined those conversations: “I started to see that that communication about information would start to be a more social thing – that it would be going from top-down to flip that on its end.”

Little did he know he’d be one of the people doing the flipping.

From writing casually for a few Mets blogs, he’s now a juggernaut in the world of social media and – particularly of late – in using it to curate the news. He’s been an invited speaker at industry conferences like SxSW, Social Media Week, and Toronto’s Mesh. In the past two months alone, he was quoted by David Carr in the Times, cited by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, interviewed Times‘ chief Bill Keller (generating a maelstrom of discussion online), and been praised by the editor of Salon.

He has 8,200-plus followers on Twitter (impressive for a non-celebrity), is included on 626 Twitter lists (very impressive for a non-celebrity) and has a stunningly high Klout score of 81 (what comes after “very?”).

But what he’s perhaps best known for is Tumblr, a platform now seeing 8.4 billion monthly pageviews. The Times proclaimed him “the undisputed king” of Tumblr, deservedly so. Mashable named his blog, SoupSoup, one of the best tumblogs of 2008; it’s currently one of the top 250 blogs in the world according to Technorati. It has nearly 30,000 posts, with an average of 22 posts per day since its inception in late October, 2007. The number of followers a blog on Tumblr has isn’t public; De Rosa indicated that he’s currently “just short of 25,000.”

In other words, between his Tumblr followers and his Twitter audience, more people see De Rosa’s updates than attended that Mets game. That’s what you call a platform.

SOUP AT WORK

De Rosa does have a day job. He’s Product Manager for Reuters Media, a position that affords (necessitates?) such a robust online life. Where other bosses might shy away from an employee so active on social media, De Rosa and his employers saw the advantages – particularly, increased engagement with Reuters content, including assuring that De Rosa had his own space to write. A recent interview he conducted with outgoing Times editor Bill Keller on that Reuters blog, next to Reuters’ ads, created a maelstrom of online commentary and sharing – in part because of Keller’s steadfast commitment to keeping social media at arm’s length. Reuters opens doors for De Rosa, to be sure, but his personal platform pulls back the window shades.

Actually, De Rosa seems them as platforms, plural. Each is distinct: the content he pushes out to Twitter is not necessarily the content he shares on Tumblr. This isn’t a ploy to force people into using Twitter or Tumblr – it’s a recognition and utilization of each platform’s strengths. (He admits that he’s less active on Facebook, in part because of the time demands produced by generating unique content on two platforms already.)

A decision to build audiences on two platforms doesn’t automatically create a large combined audience, of course. De Rosa seems as mystified at how the audience arose as anyone else, attributing it to the regularity of his updates and his reblogging and retweeting. But, again, that doesn’t automatically create an audience either.

Here’s Salon’s Editor-At-Large, Joan Walsh, describing her media diet to The Atlantic Wire yesterday:

The crazy thing that happens on Twitter–it’s an old school journalist’s worst nightmare–is that people are just spreading rumors. So having good journalists (Anthony De Rosa comes to mind) who are filters and say either “I got someone on the phone to confirm this” or “The New York Times has confirmed ‘X’” is important.

What she calls filtering, others (myself included) might call curation. It’s picking out interesting items of information, sharing, validating and correcting them on the fly. “Filter” is passive. What De Rosa does isn’t passive.

The genius of Twitter and Tumblr as platforms is how easy they make curation. In each, a single click pushes a single bit of information out to one’s own followers. It’s as immediate an implementation of Dave Winer‘s law of the Internet – “the more you send them away the more they come back” – as you can get. But you have to send them somewhere good.

That’s what De Rosa excels at. As Walsh notes, you can trust where he sends you. And if he shouldn’t have sent you there, he explains that, and explains why. If he’s not sure the information is accurate, he tells you that, too. That’s the authority at the heart of Walsh’s statement.

Then, there’s finding things to share. De Rosa has an experienced eye for what’s interesting in global politics, and the media, and the web, and sports, and cultural events, and New York City – and so on. He also has sophisticated streams of information. There’s the Reuters wire, which must be the equivalent for De Rosa of giving The Wire‘s Bubbles a heroin IV. There’s who he follows on Tumblr.

And there are the 1,300 people he follows on Twitter. I asked him about that one; the stream from the 400 or so I follow is often overwhelming. His secret is lists. He’s maxed out his twenty personally-selected lists (“…the thing that kind of annoys me about Twitter is you’re only allowed to have twenty lists…”) and follows another… well, a lot. Lists allow him to filter out the noise from the raw stream; he isolates those focused on particular topics as a “monitoring tool.” He considers Twitter lists to be fairly equivalent to the Reuters wire – even in terms of early accuracy. “At the end of the day, the messages that are being posted [on Twitter] aren’t any different than when you go to sources and you talk to them,” he points out. “You still have to connect the dots and make sure that information is reliable.”

(After I’d interviewed De Rosa, ReadWriteWeb posted an article indicating that Twitter itself had only a small number of “power users” working for the company. They defined “power users” as those with more Twitter lists. Oh, and I found that link on De Rosa’s Twitter feed.)

The roadblock, then, is the old-fashioned journalism, that work that Joan Walsh values. Like others – including NPR’s Andy Carvin, with whom De Rosa is sometimes compared – De Rosa wishes that Twitter had a better system for separating the wheat from the chaff more quickly.

It has one. Users like @AntDeRosa.

EXPLORING THE PLATFORM
In July of 2009, De Rosa was hired at Mediaite as one of the site’s inaugural columnists; in March of last year, sports blogging juggernaut SBNation picked him up as editor-in-chief of the site’s Tumblr. “Anthony was one of the first people hired because of what they achieved on Tumblr,” says Rachel Sklar, Mediaite’s editor-at-large – originally hiring DeRosa – and advisor to start-ups including SBNation. That’s in part because of how closely tied to Tumblr his identity was: “For a long time, I only knew him as ‘Soup.’”

Like Mark Coatney, who was spirited away from Newsweek’s Tumblr to work for Tumblr itself, De Rosa positioned himself as both master of the platform – and innovator in how it was used.

In 2009, De Rosa partnered with Richard Blakeley (then editor-in-chief of Gawker.TV) on Neighborhoodr, a Tumblr-based local news tool. The mandate of Neighborhoodr is simple: empower local residents to share updates about their communities quickly and easily. The site now covers 113 cities in the United States and 32 cities internationally. In 2010, TheNextWeb declared that “Neighborhoodr gets it right as a hyperlocal news source.”

De Rosa gets it right as a news source, too. In February, NBC New York pegged him as one of the twenty best local news sources on Twitter in NYC. And then there’s that Klout score. Debate aside, the tool reflects a genuine level of influence. De Rosa’s score of 81 compares favorably to the New Yorker‘s Susan Orlean with a score of 67 and the Times‘ David Pogue at 76. He’s far closer, in fact, to the Klout score of 85 maintained by none other than Ashton Kutcher.

And on Twitter, Kutcher has 735 times as many followers. (Between the time this piece was finalized and when it was published, SBNation announced a new advisor: Ashton Kutcher.)

WHY HE DOES WHAT HE DOES

Now, the story behind his tumblog’s name, SoupSoup.

Short version: his friends have called him Soup since middle school. Long version: it’s because he saved someone from choking.

One day at school during lunch, Anthony was sitting at the same table as a girl who began to choke on a chunk of chicken from her chicken noodle soup. Somewhere (a movie? TV show?) he’d come across the Heimlich maneuver. He came up behind her and, after a few unsuccessful attempts, forced the chicken loose. From that day forward he was Soup. Old friends still call him that; he answers to it.

(Why SoupSoup? Why doubled? It’s an Internet tale told so many times before: “Soup” was taken.)

The point of the story is this: a simple piece of information that he’d come across potentially saved someone’s life.

Not to be melodramatic, but sharing similar bits pieces of information has become something of an obsession of De Rosa’s. If you’ve just recently come to know him, it’s probably because of the curation he’s done around the events of the Arab Spring. He’s vastly broadened his audience by performing that simple task, passing on information – particularly about what’s happening in the Middle East and North Africa. During Tahrir Square, during the run-up to military action in Libya, now with the crackdown in Syria – De Rosa has been a whirlwind of links from sources in multiple languages, moderating and refining on the fly. There’s an urgency to it that makes clear he’s not simply sharing news to build his Klout score.

I asked him why he expends so much effort on these events.

I think it’s a combination of newsworthiness and how big an effect that particular news can have on the world as a whole. I think the Middle East and what’s happening in North Africa is having a wide-ranging effect. I try to focus on things I think have will have a lot of scale and be of interest to as many people as possible.

Americans have a short attention span. But I think it’s an important story to monitor because it’s affecting us in ways we may not even realize. Maybe I try to advocate a little, but I think you can acknowledge you have biases to sorts of news you think are important.

On social networks, there’s no need to worry about ratings or attracting an audience. People are more interested in getting information.

He went on.

If people are informed – even if it’s just showing them that the rest of the world supports what they’re doing – I feel like that’s where I could do my life’s work. Continuing to be part of that conversation that allows others with more influence or power to enact change.

He’s saying, in effect, that there’s always something worthy of our attention there. To the extent that he can keep presenting those bits of news – mixed in with information about a lot of other things sometimes, in a homogeneous flood at others – he can keep American (and other Western) eyes flitting, however quickly, over something that he recognizes as important. And the people on the ground know that they’ve been seen.

Doing so effectively requires something of the curator as well: tenacity predicated on real interest. That’s the standard De Rosa brings to his curation. It’s his sweet spot.

After all, this is the guy whose favorite baseball game was one where he had the passion and will to stick with it through a long rain delay, because he loves the game and he loves the Mets. God knows that sticking with the Mets doesn’t always bear fruit. But sometimes it does. Sometimes it’s a game that you remember the rest of your life.

There are a few ways to determine if a photo has been doctored.

*EXIF data*

One way is to compare the content and source of the image with the EXIF data, which is information about the creation of the photo that is carried along with the image itself. (To learn more about EXIF information, read this previous post. In the case of the Weiner image, the image that has been shared online is a screen capture of an image sharing site – meaning that any EXIF information would be from the creation of that screen capture, not the image itself. In other words – it’s not useful for determining the authenticity of the Weiner photo.

Even if the original image turned up at this point, I should note that EXIF data can be altered – or, if you prefer, faked. It’s just text data that is embedded in the file, like the artist and song title that it buried in an MP3. So if the EXIF data of a newly-discovered image indicated it had been taken at Weiner’s office (sometimes, geographical data is included) two minutes before the image was posted – there’s no guarantee that information is accurate. (EXIF data could be more helpful here in an exculpatory scenario. If the picture had been taken in Tuscaloosa on Christmas Day, it would certainly indicate it weren’t likely from Weiner. Though not conclusively)

…And sure enough, even before this article posted, a full version of the image with EXIF information turned up, from its original “discoverer”.

Reuters‘ Anthony De Rosa looked at the data for the photo at issue and notes that it doesn’t match previous images uploaded by the Congressman – the type of camera is different, as is the content included.

In fact, in the data for the contested image certain information that would be important for verification – such as the modification date of the image – is missing entirely.

*Image Manipulation*

Some have indicated a belief that the screen captured image posted at Big Government showed signs of manipulation. Another blogger at Daily Kos runs through the argument: a software tool that compares compression artifacts in images seems to indicate that the Congressman’s name shows evidence of manipulation. But what’s noteworthy about this analysis is that the name shows the same level of manipulation as other text in the image. Meaning, then, that if the name were forged, it is likely that the site’s “Popular” and “Upload” links were also forged. Which, of course they weren’t.

No one disputes that the photo was doctored to display underwear-covered genitalia. For which I’m glad, because I’d rather not spend a lot of time assessing that claim.

*Motive and Context*

This is the most important consideration when assessing a forgery. Why would someone have faked an image? What would they be trying to fake?

In this case, Rep. Weiner readily admitted that his account had been hacked. That being the case, there would be no need to forge the screenshot. If the image had never appeared on Weiner’s account, he could prove that in other ways – contacting the image host, etc. He admits that the image could possibly have been on his account, meaning that the DailyKos’ analysis is moot. There was no reason to fake such a screenshot.

In final analysis – the screenshot posted by Big Government shows an image that appears to have been posted to Weiner’s image hosting account. It’s worth noting, too, that this is entirely consistent with what Weiner has said all along.

Philip Bump is a Photoshop Expert. He used to be a designer at Adobe Systems, Inc., makers of Photoshop. Among other things, he worked on the Photoshop user’s manual and designed chapters for the Photoshop Classroom in a Book.

As Anthony De Rosa asked when posting a screen grab of Booker’s tweet on Soup, “Great mayor or the greatest mayor?”

It’s not exactly new – you don’t get to 6.6 million users overnight. In fact, Tumblr’s been around since November 2007, when founder David Karp launched it at the ripe old age of 19 with the help of lead developer Marco Arment. Karp was waiting for traditional blog companies, like Blogger or WordPress, to come up with a platform for ‘tumblelogging‘ (short-form posting), more akin to text messaging than a longer-form blog posting (like, say, this). Karp got tired of waiting, and decided to go ahead and start it himself.

Here’s the gist of Tumblr: a dead-simple way to get out your ideas or inspirations, what you’re doing, what you like or hate, whatever snip of culture or sub-culture is engaging you at the moment, across any form of media – photo, text, quip, video, audio clip, chat transcript. The sum total contributes to a unique online identity through sharing what you gather on the web with  your followers, usually with your own two cents (even if it’s as simple as “LOL”).

There are two very important elements of Tumblr, the ability to “follow” other users and to “reblog” their posts. When you “follow” another tumblr, all of their posts show up in your dashboard, which is where you can post new content, read content created by people you follow, and see the reactions of other users to that content, theirs or yours.You can reblog the posts you like and add your commentary to the post. And it should be noted: Before there was retweeting on Twitter, there was reblogging on Tumblr.

Tumblr’s growth has been incredible. Last month, it broke Technorati’s top 50 sites on the Internet. (That’s the whole internet.) It’s not just that they have 6.6 million users, it’s that those users are highly engaged. (A year ago, in preparation for another piece about Tumblr, Karp told me that the average Tumblr post had five interactions – likes, reblogs, answers – as compared to  an average 1.5 comments on the average WordPress post.) In March, the company clocked their posts at about 2 million per day.

All this to say: Of course the MSM will want to get on Tumblr! It’s a no-brainer, and we’ll see it happen just as we saw the eventual stampede of conventional news outlets to get in on Facebook and Twitter. Everyone needs every edge they can get nowadays – why wouldn’t you take advantage of an additional content stream?

They will – eventually. Meanwhile, the smart ones are doing it first. The NYT‘s Jenna Wortham cites the now-famous example of Newsweek‘s Mark Coatney, who used the Newsweek Tumblr to engage a whole new audience with the magazine’s content (and, it should be noted, a savvy and influential audience too, including many web writers and editors who  scour Tumblr just like Twitter for content to aggregate). Wortham cites a few of the new blue-chip entries to the form – the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, NPR, HuffPo and the NYT itself; others include the Today Show, which adopted the Newsweek/Coatney model of having a Tumblr-savvy editor run the show (staffer Rina Raphael, who has been on Tumblr herself for well over a year). And — disclosure alert — online sports-blog network behemoth SBNation tapped me, a longtime Tumblr user, for the same reason (so please come visit us at SBNation.tumblr.com!).

(I should note that online sites have been on Tumblr for a while now – Black Book, Gawker, Guest of a Guest and Mediaite have all been on Tumblr for months, albeit which much less fanfare. So, incidentally, has the White House, in this official tumblr for Inauguration.)

Will Tumblr become the new Twitter? (Both seem to be taking their time to monetize, but that’s another story.) There’s no question that a Tumblr takes more work to keep up – it is essentially a blog, after all, and however short-form it may be it still takes more work than 140 characters – but there’s also no question that the payoff for smart content companies is there, in new audiences, user engagement and creative possibility. Is this the tipping point? I guess we’ll see.

— With Rachel Sklar. NB: Rachel Sklar is an advisor to SBNation, and directed the company to Anthony de Rosa for its Tumblr.  De Rosa has been frequent contributor to Mediaite since its launch last summer.

*It seems that the NYT has changed the headline. Screenshot of the original here.

In her post, Waxman gives an explanation of her feelings on the subject as well as a link to the full letter. Here’s a taste:

“Newser’s conduct violates The Wrap’s rights because: (1) The Wrap generates and gathers time-sensitive information at a cost, including, without limitation, original stories ferreted out and reported by The Wrap’s full-time employees and paid contributors; (2) Newser free-rides on The Wrap’s sweat of the brow by publishing summaries of these stories without affording The Wrap appropriate credit and a prominent link; and (3) Newser is in direct competition with The Wrap. Thus, Newser’s conduct, in addition to amounting to garden variety plagiarism, constitutes unfair competition and violates certain deceptive trade practices statutes. I refer you to the Davis E-Mail for appropriate ways to credit The Wrap when summarizing, i.e., re-writing, The Wrap’s stories.”

One of the most interesting items of note in Waxman’s post comes at the end, however, where Waxman states that she and Wolff will both be appearing on Reliable Sources on CNN this Sunday. We certainly cannot wait for that.

Unfortunately, you can only enjoy the action if you follow all four on Twitter and knew to be linking back and forth between them. That is…unless someone went to the trouble of collecting the whole argument. Wait, someone did? That someone was us?! Perfect!

Below you’ll find every Tweet in chronological order (with links to where they were originally posted) set up in a kind of script fashion. With all the “@” symbols and abbreviated grammar, it would probably sound out loud like a weird, German futurist play, but it’s definitely entertaining to read. Enjoy!

The combatants: Nicholas Carlson of Business Insider, Peter Kafka of All Things Digital, Felix Salmon of Reuters, (a brief cameo by Matthew Ingram of GigaOm ) and our own contributor Anthony De Rosa who started things off:

antderosa: I’m thinking about building a mirror of The Business Insider and Newser and running my own ads on it.

pkafka: heh RT @antderosa: I’m thinking about building a mirror of The Business Insider and Newser and running my own ads on it.

nichcarlson: @pkafka You would like us to stop direct-linking to your posts?

matthewi: RT @antderosa: I’m thinking about building a mirror of The Business Insider and Newser and running my own ads on it.

nichcarlson: @mathewi @antderosa @pkafka Now we’re in trouble because we direct-link to people? Sorry for sending the traffic! Yeesh.

mattewi: @nichcarlson @antederosa @pkafka: it’s not the linking that’s the problem, Nich — but I suspect you probably already know that :-)

nichcarlson: @mathewi @antderosa @pkafka We pay a VP to beg people to copy & paste our entire articles onto their sites (so long as they keep the links)

antderosa: @nichcarlson So we have your blessing, I assume?

nichcarlson: @antderosa You should totally talk to our bizdev VP, email me at nicholas at businessinsider.com and I’ll intro

pkafka: easy tiger. funny tweet. RT @nichcarlson: @pkafka You would like us to stop direct-linking to your posts?

nichcarlson: @antderosa http://bit.ly/d5kY1V http://bit.ly/dktMQC http://bit.ly/dzsgCr http://bit.ly/9okZPV

antderosa: @nichcarlson I’m aware of your syndication deal with Gawker, but what about other sources where you post several grafs of outside articles?

felixsalmon: @nichcarlson @hblodget Find the direct-link here! http://bit.ly/9IGH9C It’s not where it should be, in the body text. @pkafka @antderosa

antderosa: @felixsalmon @nichcarlson @hblodget@pkafka That’s like 130 words from the article, why would anyone bother reading the rest at Reuters?

nichcarlson: @felixsalmon where would you like the link?

felixsalmon: @nichcarlson around “Felix Salmon dug through the lawsuit”, perhaps, or at the very least “Here’s Felix”: *Where’s* Felix?

nichcarlson: (after editing article to make the link to Reuters on the bottom enormous) @felixsalmon Better?

felixsalmon: @nichcarlson LOL. You win.

nichcarlson: (in response to “so we have your blessing, I assume?”) @antderosa Feel free to take my stories, so long as you keep all the links. Yes.

antderosa: @nichcarlson Why would anyone need to go to your site if I post the entire article? There’s no reason to click the links.

nichcarlson: @antderosa Clearly you do not spend all day obsessing over referrer links like I do. I THRILL when HuffPo tech takes one of our articles.

antderosa: @nichcarlson If I have some kind of agreement in place, sure. If you take several grafs or the entire article, you bet the author is pissed.

nichcarlson: @antderosa Today, Gawker reposted our story here http://bit.ly/9okZPV and drove traffic to this story: http://bit.ly/8YCIsw

antderosa: @nichcarlson Yeah, but you guys have an agreement in place. Do you have that with everyone you copy from?

nichcarlson: @antderosa Only if that author’s job in no way depends on attracting new readers to his site.

antderosa: @nichcarlson But that should be up to the author to decide, not for someone to rip off their content without permission.

nichcarlson: @antderosa My rule is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But obviously, if someone emails to say: STOP LINKING, we stop

antderosa: @nichcarlson Nic, everyone wants links, but not everyone wants several grafs or entire articles stolen.

nichcarlson: @antderosa Usually, the author’s boss (or publisher, or bizdev rep) will stop the author from asking us those things. Because its dumb

antderosa: @nichcarlson You don’t get it though, you steal it first and then tell them they’re stupid for not wanting you to steal it.

nichcarlson: @antderosa We do not steal content.

antderosa: @nichcarlson Do you request permission from everyone you post entire articles or several grafs from?

nichcarlson: @antderosa Entire articles? Yes. Grafs? No.

antderosa: @nichcarlson The two Reuters grafs you reprinted was nearly 130 words. Seems a bit excessive, no? Why not just intro it and link over?

nichcarlson: @antderosa It’s just my humble opinion, but I think a better thing to get ranty about is: Why don’t tech blogs link to each other any more?

antderosa: @nichcarlson I agree, they should. I’m a big advocate of link love. I think we just disagree on how.

Well, that’s the last of it so far. A lot of interesting points are made and it seems like people agree to disagree at the end. You should probably follow all these guys on Twitter since they’re all a fun read and you never know when Round 2 might start up!

The problem is, the iPad cannot currently do what the demo presents, and it should, right now. Flash is the only current technology that would make that possible.

Apple is betting on HTML5 as the method for developing iPad content.  However, HTML5 isn’t ready to provide the tools to provide rich interactive applications, like a virtual Sports Illustrated magazine. Apple won’t allow brilliant content creators to be creative because they have failed to at least provide the option to use Flash on the device. This has nothing to do with the iPad designed as something other than a normal computer, it has everything to do with it needing to be a one stop-and-shop piece of entertainment technology. It simply can’t because Apple won’t support the authoring tools required

Steve Jobs blames Adobe for why he won’t adopt Flash.

“They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, the world is moving to HTML5.”

The problem, Steve, is that HTML5, the next iteration of HTML, is not ready for prime time yet and won’t be for many years. Standards take decades to be adopted and there currently aren’t any authoring tools for HTML5 that allow us to develop the same rich interactive content that Flash provides.

Apple has always prided themselves on design noted for what it leaves out, allowing devices to focus on the task they were meant for. However, Apple seemingly has no good strategy for content creators to build what Flash provides.

The reason why the publishing world, particularly newspaper and magazine people, were disappointed with the initial presentation of iPad, was because the focus of the device should have been a game changing way to present their content. Initially, I blamed the publishers, but soon realized, Apple isn’t providing any means to create this content. Leading up to the release, it seems they didn’t bother to work with content creators, so Apple could truly come out of the gate showing people the potential the iPad has to change the media landscape.

Apple should have worked with these content providers to have demonstrations of content that is heavy on video and interactive infographics. Smarter designers, developers, and writers could have created content that would have us all drooling over getting our hands on this device. Instead we were left wondering, what happened?

Anthony De Rosa is a veteran blogger who has been developing and providing consulting for new media since 1996. He posts his opinions on a variety of topics, social media and politics in particular, at soupsoup.tumblr.com.

2010 will be the year when we begin to consume media in a whole new way. It seems almost a foregone conclusion that Apple will release a device long lusted after by gadget geeks many are speculating will be called the iTablet. Conde Nast, Time magazine and others have already been working on how they will create content for this kind of device and they’re prepared move forward even if Apple isn’t.

Convergence between web content and television has never been done quite right. Web video has matured to the point now where people are beginning to go to their laptops before their television to catch up on programs they missed. They’re also watching original content on the web in record numbers. Content creators like fm78.net are finding the freedom and worldwide distribution the web provides without the hassle of dealing with pitching a television network to pick them up. Places like blip.tv are providing a platform for these creators with real methods to monetize their content. But how will we watch this content without having to sit down at our laptops? Sure, the tech savvy have already hacked their Mac Mini, Apple TV or XBox to do this, but when and how will the mainstream get their web video on their 50 inch plasma TV?

Enter Boxee.

At the end of 2009, a sold out event took place to reveal a device that wants to revolutionize how we consume media. Boxee collects the video you want from the web and provides it in a very slick interface that the average couch potato could manage to navigate, but with enough options to keep the power user happy as well. Unlike other devices who have tried the same, but were limited to few content providers, Boxee intends to allow the device to access virtually any video you can access from your computer. The device is scheduled to be released later this year.

The iTablet and Boxee could be a boon for folks who as of yet have had limited success monetizing content. As newspapers and magazines in their paper format continue to lose market share at alarming rates, their digital counterparts are still scrambling to find a real revenue model. Much like the way the iPod changed the way we pay for music, the iTablet could change the way we pay for newspapers and magazines.

The iTunes store and the Apple App store are game changing methods for charging for digital goods, the next logical step is to create a digital newsstand that could be access from an iTablet device. This digital newsstand could potentially revitalize traditional producers of paper media. People love the convenience of being able to buy music and applications from the palm of their hands, and the numbers prove it out. They’re likely to do the same when it comes to purchasing subscriptions to richly delivered content.

Instead of carrying around a stack of magazines and newspapers, they can have that great glossy look and feel that a laptop simply can’t provide. A tablet experience is much closer to the one we enjoy from sitting down and flipping through a magazine, but with the additional wow factor of being able to place video and interactive info graphics along with the text.

2010 could be the year we start to see the mainstreaming of not only consuming of web content on more convenient devices, but also the beginning of the end of lamenting how we can’t make money creating that content.

Anthony De Rosa is a veteran blogger who has been developing and providing consulting for new media since 1996. He posts his opinions on a variety of topics, social media and politics in particular, at soupsoup.tumblr.com.

The Yes Men‘s provocative anticonsumerist pranks tend to be hit-or-miss, with some of their more outlandish stunts not quite clicking because no one could possibly believe them in the first place.

If fooling people is their measure of success, it looks like their latest looks like it’s hit the bullseye: Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNBC all took a Yes Men press release that claimed to come from the Chamber of Commerce at face value.

The Yes Men claimed to be reversing the Chamber’s stance on climate change issues. From the release:

WASHINGTON, D.C.-The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is throwing its weight behind strong climate legislation, a spokesman for Chamber President Tom J. Donahue announced today at the National Press Club.

“We believe that strong climate legislation is the best way to ensure American innovation, create jobs, and make sure the U.S. and the world are on track to reduce global carbon emissions, and to provide for the needs of the American business community for generations to come,” said the spokesman, Hingo Sembra.

Shockingly, Reuters picked this up in a wire story, which the New York Times and Washington Post republished. And CNBC ran a whole segment on the Chamber’s ‘about-face.’

Their in-the-flesh press conference in DC wasn’t as successful: Mother Jones reports that real Chamber of Commerce spokesmen showed up and shouted, “this is a fraudulent press conference!”

According to TPMMuckraker, the (real) Chamber of Commerce wants a criminal probe on the Yes Men impersonation stunt. But for a group that thrives on publicity, any sort of publicity, this could be exactly what they want.

Here’s CNBC’s segment on the Chamber of Commerce’s stunning ‘about-face’ (h/t Mother Jones):

And here’s a video of the fake press conference, courtesy of our friend Anthony De Rosa‘s post over at Gawker:

The busts caught national attention, catapulting Christie into the limelight. He’s riding a wave that has him leading in polls despite being a Republican in an otherwise Democratic leaning state.

New Jersey Governor Corzine stumped hard for President Obama while he was on the campaign trail and Obama has returned the favor. Vice President Biden has gone so far as to call Corzine a friend and economic advisor to the administration.

However, the largest paper in the Garden State, the Star-Ledger, has endorsed neither Corzine or Christie, opting instead to back the independent candidate Chris Daggett. Their explanation:

The newspaper’s decision is less a rejection of Gov. Jon Corzine and Republican Chris Christie than a repudiation of the parties they represent, both of which have forfeited any claim to the trust and confidence of the people of New Jersey. They share responsibility for the state’s current plight.

Only by breaking the hold of the Democratic and Republican mandarins on the governor’s office and putting a rein on their power will the state have any hope for the kind of change needed to halt its downward economic, political and ethical spiral.

Another outsider, running for State Assembly, is Independent candidate Sean Dunne. Dunne left New Jersey after high school and spent nearly a decade in Ireland before returning to the states. When he returned he felt a strong need to fight the Republican and Democrat duopoly and decided to run for his local district. I spoke to Dunne about the differences between himself and the four opponents, two Democrats and two Republicans, he’s running against.

I don’t answer to any party interest or bosses.  I only answer to people that have supported me through their votes. It is so frustrating to see the same mistakes repeated, and so I felt that people have to challenge both parties.

Both Daggett and Dunne come from outside the old boy’s network of back room deals and special interests. Fighting corruption, improving government transparency and structures, tackling the costs that lead to high taxes, and opposing liquified natural gas terminals are among the issues the Independent candidates share. Daggett has said that he opposes the terminals because of a need to move away from relying on fossil fuels and to move towards renewable energy resources.

Dunne told me that the traditional methods of corruption aren’t the only ones plaguing New Jersey.

I associate corruption not only with the people that are involved in bribes, but I think many of the legalized practices of how the government operates are corrupt. The lack of truly democratic structures to our state government are key concerns.

In the process of gathering information to better understand the economics of his district, Dunne finds that the methods of record keeping are archaic, and wants to bring this data into the 21st century and into the hands of citizens for full transparency.

People are always harping on about running government like a business.  If a shareholder in a company gets free access to reports that are presented in a clear way. Towns and boards of education should be no different. We should have a large database available so whiz kids can make various iPhone applications from the data, which I understand is already underway in San Francisco.

Dunne’s suggestion is an example of how trust can be restored by giving citizens a fully transparent look at where their money is being spent, and to prevent situations like this past summer where political bosses can use their positions to sell favors to wealthy developers.

Outsiders like Dunn and Daggett are gaining momentum as demonstrated by Daggett’s Star-Ledger endorsement. They both have a long way to go, as the two party system is a tough wall to crack even in a progressive state like New Jersey. The climate is ripe for an outsider, as citizens grow frustrated with a lack of progress being made by either party. The opportunity for an Independent breakthrough couldn’t be more timely.

Anthony De Rosa is a veteran blogger who has been developing and providing consulting for new media since 1996. He posts his opinions on a variety of topics, social media and politics in particular, at soupsoup.tumblr.com.

At the Human Rights Campaign 13th Annual Dinner, Obama reiterated his campaign promise to abolish “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  The reaction by some seemed to suggest that people thought Obama was repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which is not the case, it’s just more talk.

Andrew Sullivan took the President to task, saying:

The sad truth is: he is refusing to take any responsibility for his clear refusal to fulfill clear campaign pledges on the core matter of civil rights and has given no substantive, verifiable pledges or deadlines by which he can be held accountable. What that means, I’m afraid, is that this speech was highfalutin bullshit. There were no meaningful commitments within a time certain, not even a commitment to fulfilling them in his first term; just meaningless, feel-good commitments that we have no way of holding him to.

Obama can’t repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” alone anyway, he needs to convince Congress to do so. He has control of both the House and the Senate, but he’s done little to wield that power to push forward the things a majority of Americans elected him to do.

Sullivan isn’t the only one annoyed by Obama’s tough talk and no action. Paul Krugman wants to know when he plans to address the culprits behind our economic crisis.

In response to an unprecedented economic crisis — or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedent is the Great Depression — Mr. Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: he spoke, more or less in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests.

Obama’s stalling on health care reform is well documented. He’s finally came around to releasing his own plan for reform, and up until that point made high level declarations for what he wanted Congress to develop. The ensuing food fight between Republicans and Democrats has failed to result in a bill and we’re still waiting with nearly no end in sight for one to be put to a vote.

Obama would be better off if he stopped worrying about trying to compromise and make the right leaning portion of the country happy. He can’t, and by not pushing forward, he’s simultaneously pleasing the right by not putting forth policies they oppose and giving them more fodder to say he’s done nothing. All the while he’s leaving the left frustrated and annoyed. It’s a lose/lose position he’s taking. He’s wasting the political capital he earned during his campaign by not being more aggressive about fulfilling his promises.

The Nobel committee gave him the Peace Prize because they believed he would be a transformative figure on the world stage. We elected him based on his policies for both home and abroad. He has the support of the majority of Congress and of his citizens, how long do we have to wait for him to act?

It’s time for  ”Don’t Talk, Just Do” and that goes for a lot more than just “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Sarah Lacy, tech journalist, author and columnist for Tech Crunch took a hard line stand in regards to compensation for reviews where she is concerned:

“let me address this publicly, to save the time of future Izea employees cutting and pasting the email and sending it to me again: There is no time during my life on planet earth or beyond that I will *ever* consider accepting payment for coverage. There is no circumstance or situation where I will respect a journalist who does, especially if the details of that conflict aren’t clearly disclosed. P.E.R.I.O.D.”

Lacy is a friend of “lifecaster” Julia Allison, whom MediaBistro and Gawker called out for not disclosing her relationship with Izea when she began promoting one of their clients. Izea CEO Ted Murphy called it “an honest mistake.”

It’s unclear if she had Ms. Allison in mind when she made her statement or not.

The FTC apparently doesn’t think that the marketplace alone can properly regulate itself, as part of the actual text of the FTC guide reads:

The extent that consumers’ willingness to trust social media depends on the ability of those media to retain their credibility as reliable sources of information, application of the general principles embodied in the Guides presumably would have a beneficial, not detrimental, effect. And although industry self-regulation certainly can play an important role in protecting consumers as these new forms of marketing continue to evolve and new ones are developed, self-regulation works best when it is backed up by a strong law enforcement presence.

It will be interesting to see how the FTC manages to keep an eye on such a vast network of bloggers who could potentially fall under this law. It is likely they will look to target the most flagrant offenders in order to make an example of them, and to ensure consumers aren’t being deceptively marketed to.

Upshot: When in doubt, disclose.

Booker is active in social media, he does regular videos which he posts on his website, and most recently got a fair amount of attention for a video where he humorously puts late night host Conan O’Brien on Newark’s “no-fly” list. Booker has been blogging since August of last year and has interest in curating a Tumblr for the city of Newark. Booker is very active on twitter, with close to 800,000 followers, putting him in the category of the top 200 most followed people on the micro-blogging network. As I write this column, Booker tweeted that he took justice into his own hands after witnessing someone trashing his city.

The real story of modern day Newark is chronicled in “Brick City”, a documentary that ran for five consecutive nights on the Sundance Channel, presented by Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker, who is also the executive producer of the series. The name “Brick City” comes from the architecture in Newark as well as the toughness and resilience of it’s residents.

The show focuses on Booker, along with a couple of other characters that define the city’s rebirth. Garry McCarthy, the Police Director of Newark finds himself in a political battle with police chief Anthony Campos for control of the police department. McCarthy was the former Deputy Commissioner of Operations of the New York Police Department. Under his administration, McCarthy manages to reduce murder by 37% and shooting victims by 32% in Newark, a record for a city of Newark’s size. Born in the Bronx, McCarthy is seen as a New York outsider by some, he’s challenged at a community meeting for not doing enough to stop crime. His results speak for themselves, but there are some in the community who are not convinced, either for political reasons or because he wasn’t born and bred in Newark, the same reasons we witness some opposition to Booker.

An unlikely love story between a Blood named Jayda and a Crip, named Creep is another central storyline woven through the series. Jayda got involved in gang life at a young age and wound up in juvenile detention at the age of 11.  After a brief stint in Brooklyn where she becomes a member of the Bloods, she gets into a fight with her brothers and settles in Newark. Jayda decides to straighten out her life after a two year sentence, joins AmeriCorps, meets Creep, and begins mentoring 9th grade girls. Last year, Jayda launched a non-profit, 9 Strong Women, which received its first government grants. On New Year’s Eve 2009, she gave birth to Layla Anyai, her daughter with Creep.

A scene where a major community organizer puts together a trip for fathers and their children to get out of the city for the day is so powerful that you’d have to have ice water in your veins not to be moved by it. The show is a real life version of “The Wire,” dense in scope, gripping and filled with emotion. We witness the daily city hall battles and the battles taking place on the street, between rival Bloods and Crips as well as the police. City and street politics are interwoven, with Booker so committed to crime reduction he personally patrols the streets until times as late as 4 a.m.

I left watching the mini-series wanting more, wanting to know what happens next. Newark’s story is just beginning to be told, and with “Brick City” it announces its arrival and calls on the world to be a part of it’s revival.

The most buzzed about application that does this right now is FourSquare, which makes going out and doing things a competition. If you’ve frequented an establishment more than anyone else, you’ll be crowned mayor of your favorite place. Be careful though, there are plenty of others vying for the title, and Foursquare rewards you as well for being a well-rounded traveler. Check into the same places all the time and you won’t be rewarded as handsomely as checking out new venues.

The startup, created by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, formerly of the New York City cult classic Dodgeball, created the application after Google failed to give them and Dodgeball the love it deserved. Dodgeball was ahead of its time and was a much less flashy version of FourSquare. Crowley, a graduate and now adjunct professor of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, “builds things that makes cities easier to use.” The explosion of the iPhone and location-based applications helped it become the nucleus at the center of the hyperlocal zeitgeist — and sway people to actually get off their computers and out with their friends, since FourSquare check-ins show the party growing literally before their eyes. Since it’s launch in March, FourSquare has racked up the users — and even attracted the attention of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who just this week made a personal investment in the start-up.

While you’re out, maybe you want to share what you’re doing with the world. Recently launched by my partner Richard Blakeley and I is a hyperlocal blogging network called Neighborhoodr. Neighborhoodr is the very first network of sites covering hyperlocal and leveraging the power of the Tumblr platform. Basing the network on Tumblr means it can draw from a massive base of content being created in real time by people living and doing things in the 60 different, distinct neighborhoods in the five boroughs of New York City. Tumblr makes it easy to upload content from anywhere, via email or iPhone application. You can even call into a special phone number and post audio clips to your ‘hood. So if you’re at an amazing concert in Williamsburg, you can share it with all your neighbors simply by picking up your phone and raising it in the air. New York is only the beginning. Soon Neighborhoodr will cover major cities around the world, giving a glimpse at what’s cool, what’s interesting, and what is happening right now anywhere at any moment — outside your apartment.

Let’s say you want to get out, but want to venture further, and unfortunately you have no car. An application has arrived that seems almost like science fiction. It will not only allow you to rent a vehicle, but will lead you to it and allow you to unlock it from your phone. The iPhone’s ZipCar application makes the world smaller and more accessible by putting the power to move literally in the palm of your hand.

The hyperlocal space has been driven by the technology and unlocked by our smart phones — the limits to which it can now be taken are defined only by our imagination. Fine, some of that happens at the computer — but, as these three apps show you, a lot can happen IRL as well.

Anthony De Rosa is a veteran blogger who has been developing and providing consulting for new media since 1996. He posts his opinions on a variety of topics, social media and politics in particular, at soupsoup.tumblr.com.

Right now I’m watching Fox News’ live report on the collision between a plane and a helicopter over the Hudson River today in Manhattan. It’s about 90 minutes after the crash occurred, according to the first tweet I’ve seen about it, from Anthony De Rosa at 12:10 pm. It’s a surprisingly precise way to assess it — reports place the crash at just after noon — because one moment my Tweetdeck was filled with details of brunch, coffee and morning runs, and the next tweets from people like Brian Stelter and Marc Ambinder started coming thick and fast, along with incidental reports from people I follow who just happened to be on the west side — like Michael Orell: “At Chelsea Piers Gym. This is the second time I’m watching a plane crash recovery from the Hudson. All wreckage looks to be submerged.”

(Update: First tweet I can find on this is Dan Belanger (@ziggfather) at 12 noon exactly.)

By now, 90 minutes later, the networks have gotten a handle on it — NY1 was covering it almost immediately; the New York Times put out a story at about 1:05 p.m. (following up on a news alert banner at around 12:25 p.m.); Fox News is providing fantastic live coverage with commentary from anchor/host Jon Scott, also a licensed pilot and scuba diver with rescue training, who is giving extremely sharp ongoing analysis.

But right when a story like this breaks — an event in public that no one has an exclusive on, just an army of news junkies trying to collect and share new emerging information — there is just no beating Twitter.

Here is where following a few trusted aggregators can get the story out first. Brian Stelter is a great example of this – jumping on the story, collecting sources, sharing eyewitness tweets, getting out info as it rolls in. Ditto Marc Ambinder, off his usual political beat but not his usual commitment to precision and thoroughness. Anthony De Rosa was another essential curator, the first I saw to post the Hoboken411 link (New Yorkers sometimes forget that Jersey is on the other side of the Hudson; a lot of activity on that shore, too). Upshot: there’s a vast world of tweeters out there, but knowing who to pick out and follow can give you the highest quality, most current info out there.

Now, 90 minutes later (by now 2 hours, actually) the best coverage I am seeing is on Fox News, thanks to Jon Scott, who is giving probably the best analysis of a breaking aviation event that I’ve heard (previous breaking plane incidents have been marked by bumbling, uninformed coverage; Miles O’Brien, CNN’s former anchor/correspondent who, as a pilot, IS informed, wrote a smart piece on that point after the Air France crash in June). But even with Fox News’ great coverage, I’ve had it on pretty solidly for an hour,  and keep hearing things that I read on Twitter first. It’s just a damn good information conduit — once again, if you know who to follow.

Practically, the old first sources of news are no longer first any more. According to blogger Chris O’Leary, WABC was the first local New York affiliate to break into programming – an HOUR after it happened. (NY1 was on the scene 25 minutes after the crash, according to De Rosa.) CNN, despite being on the story at first, switched over to scheduled programming at 1 pm; MSNBC did not seem to have interrupted its programming at all (this is based on a cursory channel surf every half hour or so; a news break may well have happened.) By contrast, the FDNY site, The Bravest, had an updating feed at their Shoutbox (at one point it was downed by excessive traffic, but it’s back up) and has a live video feed of the scene here. There are just new ways of getting news out these days.

Even so, Twitter will never be able to replace the reporting and analytical skill of experts (except when those experts are on Twitter) — just as a single Tweet will never have the depth of a literary masterpiece crafted over years of work. They are two different things — but where breaking news is concerned, Twitter is proving, yet again, that it dominates.

Are there confused, inexact, even false reports? Yes — I retweeted one myself, even though I signaled my skepticism (“Incredible if true: RT @marcambinder Preliminary report that all six aboard helicopter have been rescued, minor injuries.”) This is what happens with breaking news reporting; as Ash Kalb noted, eyewitness accounts are almost always rife with inconsistencies. But you can’t verify what you haven’t collected, and that’s where Twitter makes its bones.

If reporting is the first draft of history, Twitter is the first draft of reporting. For all its unreliability, unverifiability, and potential for misuse, I think I’m fine with that.

Update: Fox News has photographs of the crash in mid-air. More coverage here.

Related:
Helicopter and Plane Crash Over Hudson River: Twitter Tells the Story [Mashable]
Live Coverage – FDNY [The Bravest]
Shoutbox Feed – FDNY [The Bravest]

Hughes movies spanned from domestic gender role comedies like Mr. Mom to classic road movies like National Lampoon’s Vacation (for which he wrote the script), to the 90s Home Alone franchise.

But what really defined Hughes was his coming-of-age teen angst classics like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Buellers Day Off. My contemporaries grew up on those movies and saw ourselves in Anthony Michael Hall’s unrequited young love for Molly Ringwald. We could relate to the vicious social cliques and the politics of high school that The Breakfast Club explored and broke down. We all wanted to be Ferris Bueller and escape from boring classes, outsmart nasty principals, and sing on a giant float with fetching German lasses.

It’s unlikely that the teens of Hughes’ films could exist today. Being stuck in a school library on a Saturday for detention wouldn’t be quite the same punishment – between iPhones and Blackberries they’d never actually have to talk to each other. Ally Sheedy would be updating her Facebook status and posting to twitter about how bored she was while Judd Nelson texted Molly Ringwald something creepy. The nerd would probably be in the back creating a new app.

Ferris would never have been able to keep his location secret, someone would have snapped a picture of him on the float and posted it on Tumblr, or shot a video with their iPhone GS and posted it straight to YouTube. Simone would have been so overwhelmed with how much fun she was having she wouldn’t be able to resist checking in on FourSquare about her dinner with the Sausage King of Chicago and that Cubs game at Wrigley Field. Anyhow, that probably would have been the first place Jeanie checked. Busted!

Those teenagers existed in a snapshot of time – the 80s – but today when the news about Hughes broke, people from all walks – including kids who came of age a decade or more later – were posting those same stills from the Breakfast Club or Pretty In Pink. The hairstyles may be dated, but the essence of the characters remains relatable for anyone who’s been through it.

That, incidentally, includes a whole lot of the people creating those movies for a new generation. From the LAT:

“[I]t’s hard to find a thirty- or fortysomething writer or filmmaker who doesn’t credit Hughes as a seminal figure in their movie education. “You see Hughes’ influence on all TV comedy, especially the stylized single-camera comedy,” says Apatow. “His great film characters, starting with Anthony Michael Hall in ‘Sixteen Candles,’ were big inspirations. When we were growing up, we were all like Hall — the goofy skinny kid who thinks he’s cool, even if nobody else does. ‘Superbad’ has that same attitude, that mix of total cockiness and insecurity.”

People like Kevin Smith and Diablo Cody give Hughes credit as an inspiration. Wrote Cody this afternoon on Twitter: “Truly saddened by passing of John Hughes. Was an idol to this magna-zoom-dweebie.”

Hughes joins a sad list in a strange summer where we’re losing icons of past eras, like Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. For the 80s, though, Hughes encapsulated that decade like no other. His films were a kaleidoscope of fashion, fears, hopes and kitsch from the decade of where we played Pac Man and wondered if any moment the Russians would drop a nuclear bomb on all of us.

He leaves behind a wife of 39 years, Nancy, two sons, John and James, and four grandchildren and a résumé of films that serve as a reminder of what it was like to be young and anxious in the 80s.

With Rachel Sklar, whose grandmother mercifully never felt her breasts.

It sounds like the start of a bad joke but it was all part of another dark day for a state notorious for political corruption. It was also a day that gave the best in the Garden State a chance to show off their journalistic chops.

The Asbury Park Press did it with long-form traditional columns while the Star-Ledger‘s breaking news blog showed an old media dog can learn new tricks. As the story broke – a sprawling case of political corruption implicating Three Jersey mayors, a deputy mayor, two assemblymen, a council president, and a bunch of candidates, political functionaries and local rabbis – the state and local media were all over it.

Joe Ryan at the The Star-Ledger blog broke the news this morning at 7:43 a.m. as the FBI began rounding up the 44 people invovled in a wide-reaching money laundering case that had been in the works for two years. The Ledger’s Robert Scrianno had the first images and video of Hoboken mayor Peter Cammarano and Secaucus mayor Dennis Elwell being taken in handcuffs into the FBI headquarters in Newark, NJ.

The Jersey City Independent has been doing such a good job covering the corruption as well. They broke the story that Jersey City’s mayor was named in the criminal complaints which was subsequently picked up by Politicker and Fox 5 News in New York.

Ted Sherman at The Star-Ledger revealed how Solomon Dwek, a real estate developer, turned federal witness after trying to defraud a bank of $50 million dollars. Jean Mikle of The Asbury Park Press did a full exposé on Dwek, going into great detail about his fall and how that led him to help Feds bring down the top officials of two of the biggest cities in New Jersey.

The investigation dug up an international money laundering network involving Syrian Jewish communities in Deal and across the Hudson into Brooklyn. The Rabbis helped launder the money gathered from bribes taken by politicians and kept a cut for themselves. As if the details of the case were not outrageous enough already, it was discovered that one of the Brooklyn rabbis was accused of trying to broker a $160,000 deal for a kidney.

Here’s a list of the (known) bribes made to key politicians, according to federal authorities:

– Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano $25,000
– Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith (D-Hudson) $15,000
– Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini $20,000 (in campaign contributions)
– Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell $10,000
– Ridgefield Mayor Anthony Suarez $10,000
– Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt (R-Ocean) $10,000

Note that this list doesn’t even include the word “kidney.” Who knows what else will be uncovered. In the meantime, it was the New Jersey papers who connected the dots between the rabbis, the mayors, the launderers, and the black market organ dealers. They deserve a lot of praise for being fast, accurate, and comprehensive.

We are in an age where Twitter, blogs and social networks are the gateway by which breaking news gets distributed, but in this case, traditional news outlets won the day – not just for accurate reporting in real time of a complicated and quickly-moving story, but having the resources and institutional knowlege to put it all in context and connect those all-important dots. Yesterday, the New Jersey press lived up to the highest standard of journalism: they were reliable, and they were credible. In this age of insta-media, let’s not forget how much that matters.

Related:

Following the N.J. corruption money trail: Money laundering splintered into political probe [NJ.com]

Full Star-Ledger coverage of the New Jersey corruption arrests [NJ Star-Ledger]

**See also this extensive photo gallery of arrests and perp walks

Anthony De Rosa is a veteran blogger who has been developing and providing consulting for new media since 1996. He posts his opinions on a variety of topics, social media and politics in particular, at soupsoup.tumblr.com.

The American Society of Magazine Editors, an industry trade group for editors of magazines published in the United States, has created a set of guidelines for the digital format to make sure the difference between editorial and advertising is clear to readers. The Best Practices for Digital Media section reads as follows:

All online pages should clearly distinguish between editorial and advertising or sponsored content. If any content comes from a source other than the editors, it should be clearly labeled. A magazine’s name or logo should not be used in a way that suggests editorial endorsement of an advertiser. The site’s sponsorship policies should be clearly noted, either in text accompanying the article or on a disclosure page, to clarify that the sponsor had no input regarding the content.

Special advertising or “advertorial” features should be labeled as such.

Mediaite’s sponsored content meets these guidelines, as does the sponsored post campaign that Gawker runs among their editorial, although in the past Gawker’s sponsored posts were less obvious and more frequent. Others, for example a campaign for Sony run by National Geographic, seem to blur the lines. The word “advertisement” doesn’t appear before the ad, instead it reads “Feature by Sony.” The New York Times and CBS Marketwatch rejected the ad because it didn’t meet their guidelines.

On TV, MSNBC’s Morning Joe is now “brewed by Starbucks” – their official new sponosor, logo and everything, since June 1, 2009. The New York Times called it “the closest integration between an advertiser and a national news program in recent memory.” The day it launched, they hosted Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to discuss the partnership (complete with cooing over how delicious their drinks were). The segment was presented as an editorial segment and is not separately labeled as sponsored content on the MSNBC site.

Gawker stepped over the line completely with their Bloodcopy campaign, where they were not only guilty of blurring the line between advertisements and editorial but of nearly erasing the line altogether.

HBO partnered with Gawker for a campaign to promote the second season of vampire series True Blood that went beyond Gawker’s  normal skinning. (Gawker uses ‘skinning’ to integrate the brand of their advertiser into their overall site design, including banner, menu and sidebar images.) In this case, a PR company represnting HBO created a blog named Bloodcopy, written from the perspective of a vampire seeking vampire rights, and sent out an announcement to Gawker’s press list announcing that it had been acquired by Gawker Media. On Bloodcopy, a post went up announcing the same thing (“GAWKER BOUND,” which also briefly went up on Gawker).  There was no disclosure that this was an ad deal; there wasn’t even disclosure that Bloodcopy was about True Blood. Many people were confused.

It was convincing enough that Nicholas Carlson of The Business Insider originally posted an article ‘breaking’ the news that Bloodcopy was a legitimate new Gawker property. Carlson was an associate editor at Gawker Media’s Valleywag blog from mid-2007 through the fall of 2008. Carlson describes how he was duped by the campaign:

There were no disclosures on Bloodcopy.com that explained that Bloodcopy.com was actually a promotional vehicle for True Blood owned and operated by CampfireNYC, the marketing firm hired by HBO to market True Blood (the email came from them as well). There were no disclosures that the site also will not be “officially under the Gawker umbrella.”

Nick Denton, meanwhile, had originally gone on the offensive, scolding Carlson on Twitter for “promoting viral marketing for HBO.” As the story unwound, Mediaite Editor-at-Large Rachel Sklar distilled it thusly on Twitter : “The news is that Gawker Ad leveraged (+ undermined the credibility of) Gawker Editorial to promote an ad campaign.” Nick Denton retweeted that, in what was viewed as a mea culpa. Gawker managing editor Gabriel Snyder ran his own mea culpa, apologizing for the lack of a “bright line between the ads and edit.”  In the meantime, the original Bloodcopy post, briefly deleted,  went back up; it was also reinstated on Gawker, forcing Snyder to update his post. And, as the now-obviously-an-ad-campaign progressed, the Gawker Bloodcopy posts began showed up among Gawker editorial posts with a specific ADVERTISEMENT tag, and it shared space along with all the Gawker media properties at the bottom of the site.

The entire controversy made Bloodcopy one of the most successful ad campaigns Gawker ever ran.

This blending of content and advertorial is here to stay, as online ad departments try to find creative ways to get their sponsor’s message across to readers. However, publishers needs to be careful not to lose the trust and respect of their audience by clearly marking advertisements as such. Gawker vice president of sales and marketing Chris Batty told Nieman Journalism Lab that Gawker felt comfortable bending the rules of disclosure and that future ad revenue at Gawker will center around sponsored content.

“With vampires, we thought we could be a little looser with the disclosure and create some disbelief. If we’re around in three or four years, the majority of our advertising revenue will be in sponsored posts like this.”

Gawker founder Nick Denton famously said that “We may inadvertently commit journalism, that is not the institutional intention.” This conveniently allows Gawker to follow out Batty’s plan with a “do as I say, not as I do” ethos. Gawker no longer resides in a glass house on Crosby Street and by not committing themselves to the same standards they hold their subjects to, they’ll continue to throw stones.

I don’t find sponsored advertising a particularly good way of doing business. I find the idea of using sponsored content to  momentarily trick the reader into thinking they’re reading “real” content as a breach of trust. However, it’s a long established method, blurring the line between ad and edit copy. The challenge is to keep it clear while still offering new solutions for advertisers that make them want to pay to sponsor sites – which is the point, because that’s the only way media’s gonna survive.

Update: Great overview from James Poniewozik in Time.

Anthony De Rosa is a veteran blogger who has been developing and providing consulting for new media since 1996. He posts his opinions on a variety of topics, social media and politics in particular, at soupsoup.tumblr.com.