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USA Edition | Today Is Thursday, June 20, 2013 |
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Welcome To Newsroom Magazine
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Thanks To You We're Growing Faster Than Ever Before
Chances are you've noticed that Newsroom Magazine is a very different publication.
We care about journalism -- and we're well aware many other organizations do it far better than we.
Our editorial standards, rules of custody, and skeptical editing for everything we produce, disseminate or expose to public viewing reflects a seriousness of purpose.
Six years after our founding, Newsroom Magazine continues to evolve the online publishing and preservation model we pioneered.
There is good news to share: Newsroom Magazine is is thriving.
And some less good news: Our limited resources, both journalistically and financially, are limiting our expansion of content.
Online News Preservation
In the six years since its founding, Newsroom Magazine has extended the field of news publishing into previously uncharted areas.
We take a long range view of news -- one that considers both timeliness and historical merit.
What we do, and how we do it, was not possible in the print media era -- for our content is both timely and timeless in the sense that we share the power of immediacy with all online media plus the perseverance of an encyclopedia.
Newsroom Magazine's publishing model goes beyond immediacy -- for unlike the newspaper era -- what we publish is permanently preserved. And tagged, indexed, and constantly updated by automated sitemap sharing with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Sogou, Ewatch, Alexa, Facebook, and others at home and far away.
All of our content, is meant to be preserved. Thanks to the capture and storage of our content at Google, including all updates and changes, and full collection archiving by the U.S. Internet Archives, everything we say, write, opine -- whether wise, foolish, or inconsequential-- is preserved.
Newsroom Magazine content remains forever online, searchable and accessible 24 hours a day worldwide.
What's Hot Is Rarely What Matters
What we publish today is rarely as timely as the more traditional publications and online newspapers. What we choose to publish, sometimes days or months after a story first breaks, or on a subject neglected by most commercial media, is chosen to reflect one aspect of an ongoing reality for long term preservation.
From a handful of English-only readers when we published our first article -- the 1958 Edward R. Murrow speech before the Radio Television Directors Association in Chicago -- we have grown and wizened about our responsibilities to our readers and our own limitations and shortfalls.
Our most read article so far this year, The Adventures Of Bernie In Wonderland, was published November 23rd, 2009. The article consists of the unexpurgated SEC interview of Harry Markopolos in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi swindle case. It is not very interesting reading and it is very long -- but we published it in the belief that what it revealed was important and unlikely to remain online in its original format.
Newsroom Magazine's Storehouse Grows Every Day
The number of publications who devote themselves to publishing credible, responsible and probative content for posterity has dwindled.
Today Newsroom Magazine publishes a storehouse of credible, probative and relevant content -- well over 5000 articles including commentaries, essays, definitions, photographs, stories, reviews, discussions, tutorials, and logical explanations.
Our readership is nearly three times was it was only last year. Few might come to our content for entertainment -- for our purpose is otherwise.
If You Publish, They Will Come
We are read on Capitol Hill, along K Street, and in the halls of government inside the beltway and around the world.
We are read daily on college campuses at home and abroad. We're visited from military ships at sea. We serve law-firms, major corporations, Wall Street the UK Parliament, state governments and cities with credible useful information.
Some of the world's most prestigious news organizations use Newsroom Magazine for fact-checking.
Government Information Unfiltered, Sometimes Imperfect
The amount of official news proffered each day by government, whether at home or abroad, is accelerating. Some of it newsworthy, most of it not.
Our job is to thoughtfully choose what's worthy of the attention of our readers.
About 1% of government issued news we receive each day qualifies as newsworthy. Only the most relevant, or reflective of government at its best, or at its worst, or evidence of overreach, or ineptitude makes it newsworthy.
We leave the issue of deciding which if any of these qualifications applies to what we publish up to the reader.
Formatted For People On The Go, Or On The Hunt
All of our government news content includes above the headline call out meant to convey the principal facts, action or information for those with little time to read a long document.
Our job is to carefully and skeptically choose relevant governmental content for our readers -- and to include the unexpurgated original source material, whose chain of custody we control.
Online Editorial Standards, Ethics And Purpose
Our commitment to time-honored journalistic standards and a clear statement about the ethics to which we agree to be held today and tomorrow, Newsroom Magazine began publication when the Internet was young -- 2006.
Our prime mission then, as now, is to publish non political ideas, definitions, essays and editorials.
To speak to the state of this honorable calling.
And to inform the public about those things, events and ideas that matter most to us all.
Today, tomorrow, forever.
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Metadata is information generated as you use technology, and its use has been the subject of controversy since NSA’s secret surveillance program was revealed. Examples include the date and time you called somebody or the location from which you last accessed your email. The data collected generally does not contain personal or content-specific details, but rather transactional information about the user, the device and activities taking place. In some cases you can limit the information that is collected – by turning off location services on your cell phone for instance – but many times you cannot.
Washington
Looking For Specks In The Chicken Shit
Only last week, John Miller, CBS News Senior Correspondent was asked what the FBI might want with Verizon call data. In his answer, Miller used the term metadata, something well understood by those in data processing, if largely incomprehensible to nearly everyone else.
Metadata
Looking For Specks In The Chicken Shit
Looking through tons of data in search of patterns, timeliness, relationships, or something else concealed in large data sets — and not easily recognized or culled-out by human examination.
Miller answered the question correctly by explaining metadata is data about data, which is technically correct, which is not to say that it be either clear or expository.
Newsroom Magazine began development of a content-oriented metrics system in 2009.
Since 2011, our Tracker CMS Metrics facilities have resided on an independent server system not visible from the Internet.
That same year, Todd Blank, the visionary architect of Newsroom Magazine’s virtual hosting facilities, spoke of his interest in the fast expanding world of metadata analytical tools.
Two years later, our Tracker systems are metadata oriented and detail rich.
What we learned during the transition may be useful for those wanting to know what John Miller meant by data about data, and why the FBI thought Verizon’s immense call records data might be of use in its efforts to thwart terrorist attacks on the homeland.
Then And Now
There is a clearer way to think about the relationship between ordinary data records ( microdata ) and data pattern analysis ( metadata ). To make the concepts easier to grasp, consider the world’s most familiar data set — a telephone directory.
The Washington telephone book is a data set in the sense that the information on its many pages is a definable group — D.C. area telephone subscribers. For those over the age of thirty, the D.C. telephone book was printed — a static data set that was updated yearly.
When data-processing systems came into being the telephone directory data set was manually entered into its electronic equivalent — a database.
Data Set — A Collection Of Records
The whole phone book, whether printed, or electronic comprised a single data set — a collection of microdata records, as for example telephone subscriber names, addresses and telephone numbers.
Each data element, known as a record, comprised the micro-data — subscriber name, address and telephone number
Unlike the print version, the electronic subscriber database constantly changed as new numbers were added, or when people moved to another address, or when subscribers were disconnected from the system.
Tracking Change Generates Hidden Information
To better manage the telephone subscriber database, the telephone company kept track of every change — just as your bank does with every check, debit or credit. The log of changes is chock-full of information about time, nature of change, and the details. In the days of printed directories, the paper change log held hostage data about the subscriber data activities — or what John Miller called data about data.
The work that kept the electronic database up-to-date created a second data set — the record of the change events. If one added up all the telephone directory changes for a year the resulting number, say 78,000 in 1992, wasn’t about phone numbers, but about data events — i.e. data about data ( metadata ).
Today telephone companies sill keep records of subscribers — as well as call detail about every connection, incoming and outgoing, 24 hours a day in separate data set(s) organized by exchange, community, or cell tower.
What the FBI demanded in the FISC court order is access to all prior, existing, or subsequently collected call information — hundreds of millions, possibly billions of records. The data may have been sent to the FBI electronically, or made searchable by the FBI on Verizon’s computers. Either way, the call data collected over a certain time-span could be scanned for its meta data content.
Metadata Reveals Patterns
One of the metadata studies mentioned in media coverage of the Verizon database has been to identify patterns in calling and receiving numbers to and from phones outside the U.S.
Each time the a metadata examination of a database is studied, the results usually suggest other ways of asking the questions, or areas of interest, or need to better focus on what’s most promising. No matter how deeply the original data is studied, the privacy of the original data remains firmly in place — except for those whose pattern of conduct or calling history stands out sufficiently to warrant additional investigation.
At that point, with telephone numbers in hand, what was originally anonymous micro data can easily become a privacy risk.
