h/t to Roger.

I am struggling hard to teach this old dog new tricks.

Struggling to accept that much of what we know is no longer valid.

And trying to come to grips with the fact that crappy newspaper executives are a bigger threat to journalism’s future than any changes wrought by the Internet.

I’ll try to live blog the day here (cell service permitting). Send me your questions and comments on Twitter @jeffsonderman and watch the #WHtweetup hashtag.

11:52 a.m. Unfortunately, no cell service or wifi in the meeting room this morning. I’ll post updates later when I can.

6:03 p.m. Well, sorry the live blogging didn’t work out during the event. You missed out on some witty comments here and there, but the best parts of the day were captured in photos. See them here.

I may blog sometime later about lessons learned from my time here as the senior community host and now managing editor, but today I want to share that I am soon going to be moving to a new job.

In a couple weeks I will join The Poynter Institute — analyzing, writing and teaching about mobile and social media in the new news system.

The staff of Poynter Online are filling Poynter.org with outstanding coverage of the news industry, and I’m excited to contribute to that in some of the most exciting and fast-evolving branches of technology. I’ll also be involved in training programs at the institute and consulting for individual companies who are looking to take their social, mobile or community engagement approaches to a higher level.

The big goal of my new position at Poynter is “thought leadership” for the mobile and social news industry — bringing analysis to the big issues and developments and helping anyone who’s interested figure out what it means and what to do about it. However, I don’t expect to do this by shouting from a mountaintop.

I’ll be carrying forward the things I learned at TBD about the power of community engagement and involving users in the entire content cycle. Thought leadership isn’t really leadership if no one’s following you, so I hope you’ll all come along with me to help explore and discuss. My door is always open at jeff(at)jeffsonderman.com, on Twitter @jeffsonderman, or my relatively new Facebook page.

I want to hear from you about what you’re doing in the mobile or social space, or what you want a news provider to do for you. What do you think is being done well? What are the biggest questions that need attention?

UPDATE: For those of you I’ve gotten to know here in D.C., yes I will be staying in the area and working from here. Also, thanks to Steve Buttry for his very kind words about my move.

It doesn’t have to. The Storify site doesn’t yet give you options to customize the look of a widget. But with a few quick tweaks to the CSS of your site, you can make the Storify widget look less like a widget and more like an organic piece of your site.

Below are the before and after examples of how I modified its appearance to fit into my own site. You can use the same framework, substituting whatever fonts and colors are appropriate for your site.

Notice the major differences are the fonts and colors consistent with the rest of the site, and the removal of the widget’s header and borders.

Original Storify look

New Storify look

This paragraph is written in my WordPress blog, but notice how it flows seamlessly into the following one, which is actually the beginning of the Storify widget.

How to do it

Now that you’ve seen what you can do, here is how I did it using CSS. The following lines, substituting your own font/color styles, should be added to a new section in your stylesheet. Note that in several cases you must use the “!important” declaration on the styles because you need to override inline styles that the widget script prints by default.

Hide the entire Storify header

#sfywdgt_header {
display:none!important;
}

Align Storify body text flush with the left margin of the widget. By default it is indented 20px from the border.

#sfywdgt_body {
margin-left:-20px;
}

Remove borders, changes font and font size and background color of Storify body area.

#sfywdgt_body, #sfywdgt_body li, span.sfy_text, .sfy_description {
border:none !important;
font-family: “Helvetica Neue”,Helvetica,Arial,default!important;
background: #FCFCFC!important;
}

Changes color and behavior of links in the Storify body area. Match this to whatever your links look like in normal body text.

#sfywdgt_body a {
color:#000;
text-decoration:underline!important;
}
#sfywdgt_body a:hover {
color:#333;
}

Removes border from Storify footer area. Also increases “Powered by Storify” font size (this last one is just my taste — I felt like they deserve a slightly more prominent credit line since I’m hiding the header and a lot of the other distinctive features).

.sfywdgt_footer {
border:none!important;
background: #FCFCFC!important;
font-size:10pt!important;
}

Depending on how comfortable you are with CSS editing, you can do more advanced customizations. The key things to know are that the widget script creates three main HTML divs — the header (#sfywdgt_header) the body (#sfywdgt_body) and the footer (.sfywdgt_footer). You can modify or hide any of those by playing with the CSS.

Feel free to share links to examples of your own customizations or tips in the comments.

Most-read posts

1. My career v2.0 (beta)
2. Malcolm Gladwell’s errors on social media activism
3. What is journalism school for?
4. Video: Watch the sessions from ONA 2010
5. Answers to 10 key community engagement questions for news sites

Most retweeted

(FYI, this is based on Twitter’s automatic retweets, not counting modified retweets)

1. 
   jeffsonderman What gov’t should do for journalism: 1) Subsidize broadband for all. 2) Open all government data. 3) Let failures fail #ftcfail 29 May 2010 from web
2. 
   jeffsonderman @JeffJarvis @Mathewi Of interest, I think, regarding WikiLeaks: http://is.gd/ifFCk 05 Dec 2010 from twidroid
3. 
   jeffsonderman Nielsen finds only 34% of newspaper readers and 39% of magazine readers would even consider paying for online content http://j.mp/98ma0P 17 Feb 2010 from Twittelator
4. 
   jeffsonderman .@carr2n to Apple: You say it best when you say nothing at all http://j.mp/8eG3en (Link now broken, unfortunately) 25 Jan 2010 from Twittelator
5. 
   jeffsonderman “Pictures” aren’t ever “shared on Twitter”. There are only links to web pages with photos. Copyright for the page and photo abides. 12 Nov 2010 from twidroyd

Happy new year, everyone.

Online retailer Amazon, which leases spare web server capacity to third parties, booted WikiLeaks from its servers. The company cited a violation of its terms of service. However, it was generally understood to be a response to political pressure from U.S. senators. After that WikiLeaks moved to a French web hosting company, and the French are now looking to ban it.

Open-source data visualization program Tableau Public removed WikiLeaks-published visualizations from its site, citing political pressure. The Library of Congress even blocked access to WikiLeaks from its public computers, classifying it as a “malicious” site, which it clearly is not. Then PayPal, owned by eBay Inc., froze WikiLeaks’ account and blocked donations.

Reporters Without Borders condemned such moves as “the first time we have seen an attempt at the international community level to censor a website dedicated to the principle of transparency.”

All of this brings into clear focus a contradiction of the web — a public thing with private owners. It is best described by Ethan Zuckerman, who told CJR:

What’s really hard about this is that we perceive the web to be a public space, a place where you should be able to go and set up your soapbox and say whatever you want to say to the world. The truth is, the web is almost entirely privately held. So what happens here is that we have a normative understanding that we should treat this like public space—that you should have rights to speak, that no one should constrain your rights—but then you discover that, basically, you’re holding a political rally in a shopping mall. This is commercial speech, controlled by commercial rules.

In the late 20th century, the consolidation of major media outlets into the hands of a few major corporations was an issue of great concern and debate. Its importance diminished significantly in the 21st century as online services democratized media production and conversation and displaced the central role of mainstream news media in controlling information flow.

Now, however, we all must realize that these online services are also controlled by corporations with commercial and political interests. Just as GE, Disney, News Corp., Viacom and the like posed a threat to an open marketplace of ideas in mass media, the new corporate lords of the web can pose a threat to online freedoms that have been taken for granted.

eBay Inc. has contributed $3.4 million to federal political committees and spent $13.2 million on lobbying since 1997. Amazon.com has contributed at least $500,000 to federal candidates since 2003, according to OpenSecrets.org. Beyond those involved in WikiLeaks censorship so far, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Go Daddy (to pick a few) spend millions lobbying in Washington. So when someone like Sen. Joe Lieberman calls to complain about something they’re hosting, they listen.

This is why encoding principles such as net neutrality and an Internet Bill of Rights into national and international law is so important. Commercial and political interests will always find it beneficial to suppress some things from being said or published online — and as the WikiLeaks experience has shown, they are currently able do so without due process or subject to appeal.

* A footnote: I anticipate counterarguments that claim this is an exceptional case because it concerns classified documents, obtained illegally, arguably (though not at all proven to be) damaging to U.S. diplomacy. Even so, it does not follow that the end of removing them justifies the means of corporate and political censorship without due process. Beware that any effort to claim censorship authority always seeks first to use the public’s natural abhorrence of  outlier cases (racism, hate speech, child pornography) to justify giving authority to censor in all cases. The sensitivity of these leaked documents is not the issue — it is the now-demonstrated ease with which political and corporate interests may collude to try to expel something they dislike from the Internet.