When I was 8 years old I got to use a computer for the first time. It was an old Apple II, the kind with the green screen and sloping keyboard, and it was shared with about 30 other students who got about 30 minutes a week on it in our classroom in San Jose, CA.

By age 10, I had learned how to do some simple programming in BASIC, the language the Apple II used. For those of you old enough to remember, there was a pretty easy code to get words repeating on screen:

10 PRINT “TEXT”
20 GOTO 10
RUN

With that, the word TEXT would just appear over and over and over, line by line, until you hit the command to stop it.

Given this knowledge, of course, I did what any 10-year-old would do.

10 PRINT “ASS”
20 GOTO 10
RUN

The result:

ASS
ASS
ASS
ASS
ASS
ASS
ASS

…. and so forth.

I grew up in church environments where such things weren’t done. Repeating swear words via computer code, while juvenile, was one of my first acts of defiance. This sounds hokey to say now, but the computer was a way to express individuality about myself in ways I had not – or could not – do to date. What started as a juvenile bit of code turned into other forms of expression. I used the Logo program to draw pictures. My first was a castle, but rather than build a program that would build the castle in one shot I wrote tiny subprograms that built a tower, a base, a drawbridge, a moat. Then I wrote a larger program that combined those. My castle was a big program that assembled smaller programs.

I learned there was logic to the ways we assemble the world and I learned the language of programming, even if it was a simple form. It was architecture for my universe. I was hooked.

So when I say I’ll miss Steve Jobs, who died today at the age of 56, I mean it. I don’t miss celebrities. I didn’t cry at one of my grandfathers’ funerals. But I am a little teary-eyed tonight. I grew up in the Silicon Valley around the tech boom, and it was an amazing time. I loved everything about what was going on there and I gobbled up the San Jose Mercury News’ Science & Technology section every week to keep up with the latest. I was 10, mind you. Ten-year-old boys should be getting into trouble, chasing girls, getting dirty, playing baseball. I was just too curious at my age, wanting to know more about the amazing things going on in the Bay Area at the time. And I was inspired by them.

So I became a journalist. Yeah, not a programmer, but that’s not the point. I didn’t see it as a leap. The curiosity that led me to learn a little programming, teach myself HTML and make my first home page on the Web in 1993, use desktop publishing in the 1980s …. all of that was inspired by these wonderful machines Apple kept putting out. But it was that curiosity that made me want to be a journalist.

I tell my students this all the time. Most of the time, I fear, they aren’t listening. If you aren’t curious about the world around you, if you have no imagination to see stories without me holding your hand, then you’re studying the wrong thing. Curiosity is the one thing I can’t teach you, but I hope I can inspire it in you. Steve Jobs inspired that in me. He was always a bit mythical, a bit heroic. He believed in creating beauty, not destroying things. And he wanted to leave his mark on the world, to make it better.

He was no celebrity, damn it. And I cried tonight at the news. I don’t have many heroes in life, but Steve Jobs was one of them. And I don’t think I’d be who I am now without some of the products he made and the philosophy that guided their creation.I have learned a lot from his approach.

If you have an Apple device and love it, stop for a second and think beyond them. There is a logic and beauty to your Mac, your iPod, your iPhone, your iPad. The form factor, the interface, the look and feel are all part of a bigger effort to make something remarkable. You can’t make those things if you are just a programmer, just a designer, just a manufacturer. You need a good team, and you need to be curious about the world around you. In his , Jobs told the story of taking a typography class and how it influenced the way type was done on the Mac, and then I think about how bored our students get in typography these days. They are missing out. Those little avenues of knowledge are the pathway to bigger things, bigger dreams. I wish more of my students saw this, that success comes from smaller building blocks and you have to give those small things your attention and devotion before you can do something bigger.

Apple products are the It item of our time, but they are not the thing. We don’t need more Apple products. We need more people to be curious, work hard, and dream a little to give us the kind of world that gets us such amazing things. We need that in tech, in music, art, politics, and so many other areas of life.

I’m saddened by this news, sadder than I’ve been in some time. Thank you, Steve, for inspiring so many people. Including me. I hope we carry that forward.

If you follow new media and journalism at all you’ve probably heard that Allbritton Communications is breaking up the TBD.com band. The news is pretty distressing. The site is not shut down, but everything that made it great is gone or going away soon now that the layoffs are happening.

Instead, TBD is reverting back to just another TV station website. Vision, gone. Innovative experimentation, gone. Patience, apparently never had it.

TBD was a much-watched experiment in pushing journalism forward in an age of cutbacks and more cutbacks. It was an open break from the traditional model of hierarchy and standard beats, focusing instead on news that is breaking and done in concert with community conversation. It’s hard to describe their model except to say that they used community conversation and contribution to build news as it broke, then followed it up with original reporting that made use of that conversation as well as other journalistic skills. Social media was a tool at the heart of all of this, not just done for its own sake but rather to produce news collectively.

I’ve come to admire some of the amazing creative staff that was making this project go, folks such as , , , and . They are the kind of journalists I hope my students will become one day, people with a deep sense that journalism rooted in community is vital journalism.

Most inspiring was their sense of discovery, something we need more of in these trying times for journalism. Their palpable sense of adventure was a gift to us all because it seems in short supply these days. Perhaps the loss of that excitement is the most depressing result from this layoff news. They really were trying to reinvent the way we conceive and produce news. It was a worthy experiment, and one I hope others will emulate.

Allbritton gave up on this thing too soon. It only had six months, hardly enough time to build audience while trying to dream up something new. Some of us have been talking today on Twitter about whether TBD failed. Nonsense. TBD wasn’t given enough time to fail.

The good news is that there are some talented folks on the market now for a visionary who wants to do something great, something Allbritton apparently couldn’t stomach. I’m certain there is more to this story behind the scenes, but I can’t imagine any scenario in which TBD would have been highly profitable in the D.C. market while trying something totally unique. Allbritton should have known this going in, and if it didn’t have the patience to stay the course then it should not have tried. TBD was a true startup, the best idea I’ve seen in a while that offers a vision for online journalism that actually shows it gets the read-write Web. It had the kind of vision that needs time to bloom.

I hope we can move forward on what TBD gave us, and that the sense of adventure and experimentation isn’t lost. Even if Allbritton failed in its sense of vision, TBD gave us a roadmap. Let’s keep traveling those paths and see where it takes us.

And if it takes ditching the corporate structures to really give things like TBD time to incubate, do it.

Update: Some analysis of TBD’s traffic numbers. Shaking my head a little bit more. If visits and uniques were good after just a few months, why abandon ship?

I’m a huge fan of The Simpsons, there’s no secret about that. One of my favorite clips, which unfortunately I can’t find on YouTube in English, comes from an episode a few years back when Homer decides to start an Internet business because he hears everyone’s making money.

The scene starts with Comic Book Guy surfing the Web for, um, adult photographs and finds the images loading too slow. He spies Homer’s “Internet King” banner ad and wonders if it’s time for an upgrade in Internet connection speed.

Cut to the next scene, with CBG visiting Homer at Homer’s “office” (his house, because, why not?): Read more

Clay Shirky’s post that examines the historical underpinnings behind the current newspaper collapse is making the rounds today on all my social media channels. It’s longish, and a pretty detailed, but if you’re concerned about collapse of this medium in your community it is worth the time.

As I read it, I am reminded that as much as I loved the good old days, we aren’t going back. The model between information access, publishing ability, advertising, and economics has shifted too radically. It doesn’t mean newspapers are going to die, but it does mean that the old business model is only going to work in some types of settings (small rural towns come to mind). By extension, though, it means that more newspapers are going under if they don’t radically shift gears. The model just isn’t sustainable in certain community types.

I am glad that Shirky offered a road map for the way forward. A cynic would say he’s being vague, but at this point I’d settle for a vague set of principles to guide innovation. We’re still at that stage. Anyone claiming to have the answer is being dishonest.

This summer, I’m going to help my students brand themselves.

In about three months I’ll get my second go-round here at Missouri with Online Journalism, the online-only course we teach our masters students through Blackboard. I taught it last summer and had a great experience and am looking forward to doing it again.

The MU Direct program tends to attract journalists looking to get their M.A. while retraining for a new set of skills. Last year we focused on blogging early on, perhaps a little too much. The student reviews, while positive, reflected a desire to do more. In fact, it was a hunger. Read more