'Internet Is Coming'

When NPR correspondent Pam Fessler switched desks recently, she came across a 1994 memo she'd saved heralding the Internet's arrival in the newsroom. "Internet is coming to NPR!" the memo began -- before helpfully explaining just what the Internet was:

"Internet is a collection of computer networks that is connected around the world...."

The iPhone photo of that old memo shown above comes from assistant producer Sam Sanders. Sam posted it on the Instagram photo-sharing service last week. That's where NPR's multimedia staff saw it and shared it on their Tumblr page, where it was quickly "liked" and re-blogged hundred of times. All of this just underscores how much the world has changed in a mere 18 years -- as does the fact that the memo was sent in paper form to begin with.

Along with Pam's copy of a 20-page manual handed out the following month to explain how to use email, that 1994 memo brought back memories from those relatively early days on the digital frontier. OK, "early" for those who weren't directly involved in academia, technology or national security.

NPR's Internet link was established around the same time I joined the staff at the News & Observer in Raleigh-Durham, N.C. -- one of the very first newspapers to invest heavily in online anything. I was hired to cover science and technology. My only qualification: The editors told me I was one of the first reporters they'd met who had a personal email address.

The cluster of universities and technology businesses that make up North Carolina's Research Triangle area meant I was writing for a readership that was unusually well-connected digitally. But the newspaper's editorial style also required me to define any terms I used in my stories that were not yet in common use. Not so easy, given my beat, which led to some fairly contoured phrases in my stories.

In a February 1995 article about a hacking case, I had to define the "the Internet," which I called "a vast matrix of interconnected computers used by millions of people." A few months earlier, in a story about free speech online, I called the Internet "a decentralized, international web of computer networks."

Another article from that same time was about a new online patent database. That one required me to define "the World Wide Web," which I dutifully described as "a graphical, easy-to-use way to look for digital information from around the globe." That was November 1995, not long after the first versions of Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer and AOL's rudimentary browser began popularizing the Web.

To protest this frustrating style edict, I sometimes seeded my stories with Yiddish words from the "sch-" pages of the dictionary. In one article, I referred to a three-dimensional computer model of rat's nose used for toxicology research as a "cyber schnoz."

"You can't cut that," I told the copy editors. "It's in the dictionary."

Speaking of the dictionary, I should probably remind you that newspapers were a paper-based format for distributing news and advertising to large audiences.

The format was popular in 19th and 20th centuries -- before it was superseded by a decentralized, international web of computer networks called the Internet.

'The Nations' Airy Navies'

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

"Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from Locksley Hall

(The photograph above shows the wreckage of an unmanned U.S. Navy blimp after an August 1957 nuclear test in Nevada. Be sure to note the people gathered around the crash site. Image courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office via historian Brett Holman's Airminded website.)

Interactive Local 404: Can Labor and Management Be Facebook 'Friends'?

"Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labour." -- Karl Marx, 1847

A New York Times story about the United Auto Workers challenges that particular Karl Marx analysis. Reporter Nick Bunkley describes how the autoworkers union has been using social media to communicate with members during recent contract talks with Chrysler, Ford and General Motors. And it even points to ways that tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter may help management and labor communicate more effectively with each other.

"Through Facebook, autoworkers at plants in Kansas City, Mo., or Kokomo, Ind., have been able to voice concerns and ask questions directly to the bargaining teams, something they could not do in past years. Facebook helped workers at a Chrysler factory in Dundee, Mich., gather support before voting last month to join the national contract; they had previously been covered by a separate agreement that provided less job security."

When a UAW website crashed after it posted new Ford and G.M. contracts, the union turned to social media to get details to its members:

"While the U.A.W. worked to repair its Web site last week, it posted a summary of the Ford contract on Facebook, and received more than 500 comments in response. Since ratification meetings started, the moderators of the U.A.W.'s page for Ford workers have been busy answering requests to clarify sections of the contract language, sometimes responding within minutes.

"In several instances, the union used Facebook to rebut rumors being disseminated on plant floors or in the news media, rather than allowing them to spread unchallenged."

One section of the Times story focused on Art Reyes, president of UAW Local 651 in Flint, Mich., who described his active Facebooking during the contract talks as a generational imperative:

"Mr. Reyes represents a G.M. parts processing plant staffed entirely by entry-level workers, many of whom are in their 20s, new to the bargaining process and more likely to engage one another online than at the union hall.

"'They're used to expressing themselves on Facebook or on Twitter. Getting real-time answers is something they have an expectation of,' [Reyes] said. 'Nothing feeds the rumor mill like a lack of information.'"

And it seems the automakers took a similar view. In G.M.'s case, the company and the union actually joined forces to communicate with employees via Facebook. As Kim Carpenter, a G.M. spokeswoman, told the Times:

"There's a lot of different filters out there, and this enables us to communicate directly with the membership, and we think that's a good thing."

Having been at the table as a management representative for my employer during contract talks last year, I can't help but see -- and believe in -- the potential of greater labor-management collaboration. But that kind of collaboration can play both ways with different constituencies. The comment threads I scrolled through on the UAW-G.M. Facebook page seemed to be dominated by remarks, many in all-caps, from UAW brothers and sisters who were unhappy with parts of the new agreements -- especially frustrated retirees like the person who wrote this:

"JUST A NOTE TO ALL RETIREES,IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY WITH THE WAY YOU WERE LEFT OUT OF THE NEW CONTRACT,YOU CAN HAVE YOUR VOICE HEARD BY CANCELLING YOUR UNION DUES, CONTACT YOUR LOCAL UNION FOR INFORMATION ON HOW TO DO THIS. THANK YOU"

Or this one:

"It is a very sad time when retirees have to worry MORE about what the UAW will do to their pensions & benefits than the company!! They are supposed to protect the things we worked for rather then sell us out."

So, can the machines be employed by specialized labor to quell the revolt of specialized labor?

Providing a forum for unhappy constituents to share their unhappiness, and then actively responding to those comments and engaging the commenters is a social media tenet.

Another social media tenet is that the line between and among institutions and individuals is thiner and fuzzier than ever. That's as true for a union, a company and their members/employees as it is for, say, a government and its citizens, or a media company and its audience.

Whether that results in cacophony or symphony has more to do with the players than the instruments.

In the end, a machine ain't nothing but a machine.

(Photo up top was taken by John F. Martin on an assembly line in Flint, Mich. Chevrolet is the photo's copyright holder.)

Red Light Means... Stop and Remember When It Didn't

Those new fangled traffic lights are quite a marvel, aren't they? At least they were 75 years ago.

Back then, Jam Handy was to instructional films what Walt Disney was to early animation. In 1937, Chevrolet hired Handy to produce a short film explaining "automated signal lights." The devices were just in their second decade of use, and there was still astounding variation from place to place. "Even now," the film's narrator said, "traffic engineers are working with safety councils toward a national standardization of the traffic signal system."

I found Handy's nine-minute movie in the Prelinger Archive after a friend shared a link to an edited version posted by The Atlantic. For me it was yet another reminder that most commonplace technologies -- the once-complicated tools we now use almost absentmindedly everyday -- were once disruptive and confounding, too. As Atlantic Cities editor Sommer Mathis puts it:

"It's easy to forget that at one point in our history, there was no national standard that red meant stop, and green meant go -— many cities operated their own unique versions of automated traffic signals, some with four colors, and others with only two."

Actually the use of red and green signal lights pre-dated traffic lights. Credit for adapting the color-coded signal system used by railroads for automated traffic management goes to William L. Potts, an inventive Detroit police inspector who also gets credit for another innovation: the first police car equipped with an experimental radio.

Will wonders never cease!

Something Just Clicked: A Date With Destiny?

"Computers and society are out on a first date in this decade and for some crazy reason we're just in the right place at the right time to make the romance blossom."

-- Apple co-cofounder Steve Jobs in 1983.

That was the year before Jobs' company introduced the Macintosh -- "the computer for the rest of us," as it was promoted at the time. The original asking price for the Mac: $2,495, or $5,440 when adjusted for inflation.

Jobs (1955-2011) "was arguably the best ambassador ever between androids and humans," wrote Linton Weeks, my coworker at NPR:

"When Jobs died Wednesday at 56 after protracted combat with pancreatic cancer, the world lost a valuable shuttle diplomat between computers and tablets and gadgets and animated robots, and the people who so desperately long to relate to them."

Linton added: "He is not gone. He will not be forgotten. His soul is in the machine."

The image above is from Jobs' presentation in January 1984, when he publicly unveiled the Mac. And the quote up top from 1983 comes from author Steven Levy's 1994 book, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, The Computer That Changed Everything.

This Just In: When 'Completeness' Sinks a Good Story

Page one of the April 16, 1912, edition of the New York Times is among the most iconic newspaper fronts ever. A large photo of a giant steam ship appears under a three-line banner headline. The first line reads:

TITANIC SINKS AFTER HITTING ICEBERG

That may be the front page that shows up most in the history books. But the far-less-remembered front page from the previous day's Times is the one that most suggests what the future of news would look like 99 years later. And it may even offer a little inspiration to the news editors of today -- especially in their struggles to seamlessly take in and integrate the continual flow of news links and social information from around the world.

These days, eye-witness videos and accounts posted in Twitter-length dispatches give far-flung journalists almost immediate access to firsthand information. Those details are often skimpy and sometimes unreliable -- but not more so than the preliminary and even "blurred" radio reports the Times used to tear up its front page late one Sunday night a century ago.

When the Times staff finished updating the April 15 edition, the calamity in the frigid Atlantic was still unfolding. The editors had just enough information about the sinking ocean liner to rush the story into the paper under a rat-a-tat "this just in" headline:

NEW LINER TITANIC HITS AN ICEBERG;

SINKING BY THE BOW AT MIDNIGHT;

WOMEN PUT OFF IN LIFE BOATS;

LAST WIRELESS AT 12:27 A.M. BLURRED

This was news as it was happening -- events still in the present tense. A disaster was clearly underway, even based on what little had been heard directly from Titanic's crew by 12:30 a.m. -- nearly two hours before the infamously "unsinkable" ship went under.

The information the Times had to work with that night was based on radio communications monitored by a remote wireless station operated by the Marconi International Marine Communication Company on the southern tip of Newfoundland. Marconi radios were the international Twitter feed of their day.

One short article boxed atop the next morning's front page laid out the story moment-by-moment -- almost like a contemporary live blog. The headline -- LATEST NEWS FROM THE SINKING SHIP -- signaled the incremental nature of the information. The text started at the beginning with the initial distress signal sent by Titanic's radio operator -- "C.Q.D." -- and continued chronologically:

"CAPE RACE, N.F., Sunday night, April 14--At 10:25 o'clock to-night the White Star line steamship Titanic called 'C.Q.D.' to the Marconic wireless station here, and reported having struck an iceberg. The steamer said immediate assistance was required.

"Half an hour afterward another message came reporting that they were sinking by the head and that women were being put off in lifeboats.....

"The Marconi station at Cape Race notified the Allan liner Virginian, the captain of which immediately advised that he was proceeding for the scene of the disaster.....

"2 a.m., Monday.--The Olympic at an early hour this, Monday, morning, was in latitude 40.32 north and longitude 61.18 west. She was in direct communication with the Titanic, and is now making all haste toward her.....

"The last signals from Titanic were heard by the Virginian at 12:27 A.M.

"The wireless operator on the Virginian says these signals were blurred and ended abruptly."

The Times has posted a PDF of the full story, along with an accompanying front-page "write-through" summarizing what the Times had learned. That story was written in a more traditional inverted-pyramid format -- with as much who, what, where, why and how crammed up top as a sentence could hold. It began:

"HALIFAX, N.S., April 14.--A wireless dispatch received to-night by the Allan line officials here from Capt. Gambell of the steamer Virginian states that the White Star liner struck an iceberg off the Newfoundland Coast and flashed out wireless calls for immediate assistance."

But the adjacent "tick-tock" -- the Titanic "live blog" -- clearly did a better job conveying the drama and uncertainty of that night's events.

There are lessons in this for today's digital editors. Too many of us in online news still depend too heavily on a newspaper-like convention of completeness to tell breaking news stories -- as if we were somehow editing our homepages to be sold on street corners and thrown from trucks onto doorsteps and driveways. But instead of delivering completeness we often end up providing a simulated thoroughness -- a "completeness falsity" that can unintentionally and artificially overstate what we know and understate what we don't.

We post long, scrolling stories that top with the facts as we know them, even when we know them to be incomplete, if not misleading.

We "weave in" updates, challenging users to click on headlines that often read remarkably like they did before the story was updated. Then we ask the readers to hunt through a thousand or more words of text again for any newly added quotes or details or background. These stories seem to be written and edited for one-time visitors.

We also carefully segregate our conversations with our audience and our sources from "the story" itself, even when our audience and our sources are the same people, and even though social media channels like Twitter and Facebook make those conversations far more public than our sites are designed to integrate and convey. Tools that help sift and present selected social media posts, such as Storify and Storiful, have started to change that, but most of us still have a ways to go in how we showcase this material.

None of this is to say that dependable old-fashion prose no longer has a place in breaking news. But leaning more heavily on other ways of telling the immediate story can free a news site's prose writers to focus on meaning, explanation and implications -- angles that tell readers where stories are going, rather than trying to keep up with an ongoing event.

On election night last November we tried to do a bit of all that on the NPR website. Instead of just linking to a live blog from our homepage -- headline, blurb, click -- we actually turned the homepage into a live blog, which ran side-by-side with links to a more traditional overview and related analysis, a balance of depth and immediacy. (The screen shot to the right shows the top of our 3 a.m. election homepage. Click to enlarge)

Most of us in the breaking news biz are still trying to come up with new designs and presentational metaphors that put all the pieces of our coverage together in a way that captures both the significance and drama of the events we're covering. The work of bygone "newspapermen" from our industry's past may help point the way.

The New York Times coverage of the Titanic's sinking reminds us that even newspapers once knew how to break the conventions of the completeness falsity -- especially back in the "extra, extra," "Sweetheart, get me rewrite" era of competition and multiple daily editions. Tapping those deep-seated instincts again will serve us as well in 2012 as they did in 1912.

(The grainy image atop this story shows an enlargement of one small part of the Times' April 15, 1912, front page, as described here. The complete caption reads: "WHITE STAR LINER TITANIC. Largest Steamship in the World, Which Has Hit an Iceberg on Her First Voyage Here." The Times has posted an interactive version of that day's edition on its TimesMachine. Two articles from the April 15 edition also are among those linked from the Times' Titanic topic page.)

Updated: Corrects link to TimesMachine page in kicker above. Fast fingers sink ships!

Orbital Mechanics: Plunging Into Space Station Toilet Repairs

"That's the great thing about spaceflight. One day, you're doing the most outrageous thing humans have ever done -- spacewalking. The next day, you're fixing toilets and packing boxes."

-- Astronaut Michael Fossum, after Expedition 28 cremate Ronald Garan successfully repaired a toilet aboard the International Space Station.

CBS News has a full account of Wednesday's extraplanetary plumbing job. The "Orbital Outhosue Team" logo above appears on the wall over one of the station's two commodes -- a $19 million Russian-built toilet system delivered by the crew of the STS-126 mission in November 2008.

(Image: April 2009 NASA photo)