It might be a stretch, but as I was reading the article I thought what if the words newsrooms or reporters or editors were dropped into some paragraph would the advice then sound right also. Let’s give it a go with some article excerpts, you be the judge:

 The goal here is to stabilize a government, not bring it down; to persuade people to cooperate, not bludgeon them into submission….Nagl’s counterinsurgency manual … advises troops to get to know the locals — both individually and as groups — and gain their trust … they’re already plugged into the communal network. “Arguably,” the manual says, “the decisive battle is for the people’s minds.”

A key tenet of network theory is that a network’s power grows with every new node. But that’s only if every node gets as good as it gives.

“This enemy is better networked than we are.”

“The real problem with network-centric warfare is that it helps us only destroy. But in the 21st century, that’s just a sliver of what we’re trying to do,” Nagl says. “It solves a problem I don’t have — fighting some conventional enemy — and helps only a little with a problem I do have: how to build a society in the face of technology-enabled, super-empowered individuals.”

The slow-moving Defense Department bureaucracy hasn’t worked quickly enough to roll out wired gear for the troops. Insurgents seized on commercial technology quicker than anticipated.

 ”You have your social networks and technological networks. You need to have both.”

And here is perhaps what’s new and could be adapted for newsrooms:

The Army has set aside $41 million to build what it calls Human Terrain Teams: 150 social scientists, software geeks, and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year. The first six HTTs are already on the ground. The idea, basically, is to give each commander a set of cultural counselors, the way he has soldiers giving him combat advice…

Soon each team will get a server, a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish, and software for social-network analysis — to diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic, and tribal landscape, just like the command post of the future maps the physical terrain. But those HTT diagrams can never be more than approximations, converting messy analog narratives to binary facts. Warfare will continue to center around networks. But some networks will be social, linking not computers and drones and Humvees but tribes, sects, political parties, even entire cultures. In the end, everything else is just data.

Packs of television reporters scurried around doing the same thing I was doing, only more aggressively and with a bigger camera and a better dressed inquisitor at the helm. It was then that I fully realized that I was part of the media circus myself. I turned around and headed back toward my car.

If you read his account, and if you read the bomb-threat briefs being filed at OffTheBus, you will indeed see that OffTheBus was 100 percent caught up in the media circus. Why? I thought OffTheBus would be an alternative to being on the bus. On the day of the hostage taking National Public Radio mentioned it in the news, but hardly went scurrying around as OffTheBus did.

Bissell’s little essay is as much OffTheWall as it is OffTheBus, but as a former editor, it tells me that with some real editorial direction, he could accomplish his own goal which is to be:

 …a footsoldier for truth, telling stories about life on the ground on America’s finest political stage, the 2008 New Hampshire Primary.

So the challenge for Rosen, the Huffington Post and OffTheBus editors is how to assist him in telling stories about life on the ground as a footsolider for truth and to ensure he is not just one more part of the media circus.

The goals for OffTheBus are still not fully clear to me. I have watched Grayson Daughters videos, they are very good. I know Daughters, she has a quirky style, but you will not see it in her OffTheBus videos. They seem just like the mainstream’s stuff. So what’s the point?  I have to try to set up an interview with Rosen or other OffTheBus decision maker to see what they are thinking.

Here is one opinion from  Prescott Shibles:

I would even venture to say that having even mediocre Web/multimedia skills makes you far more employable and valuable. Those skills will dramatically impact salary and the number of job offers…telling students to be a specialist in a world that values versatility is doing them a disservice.

  What are your thoughts? Join the discussion.

Here is another update, from Paul Conley, who works with folks who hire young graduates:

…what I hear every day from my clients and other professionals — a college kid with a resume that could have been written in the 1970s is not worth hiring. I don’t care how well he writes. Writing well is not enough.

Join the discussion.

The point is that the ready and largely uncritical embrace of the war narrative—in key realms of the public sphere—precluded the possibility of a serious public debate about other options.

Cunningham argues the need for a rhetoric beat. My guess is it will not happen in the mainstream media, especially in an era when we have massive job cuts. Might be too esoteric, but what if enough people interested in language pooled their money to make a rhetoric beat happen. It’s what I am trying to think through at the my Representative Journalism site.

“If you build it, they will not necessarily come. We have, a number of times, assumed that if we built the Web architecture for citizen journalists to send in their reports, they just would.”

So here is Current’s reaction:

Having realized that obtaining viewer-created content is not that easy, Current is positioning the television network as an incentive for online participation. Current’s Web site, which previously existed to solicit viewer videos, was reorganized and put up two weeks ago with new social networking features. Viewers are now able to watch a pod on television, post a text or video response on Current.com, and potentially see their response appear on television shortly thereafter.

As long as three years ago, Xeni Jardin, one of the four co-editors of BoingBoing.net, was saying that citizen generated content, like blogs, should be seen as raw materials, which can be built into a more refined product. I thought long before now everyone had heard Rosen’s and Jardin’s messages, but maybe not.