Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

Distributed Journalism: An Example

The Daily Kos is looking into a White House correspondent with questionable bona fides. People in various places are contributing some reporting, and the results promise to be worth seeing, one way or the other.

Copyright Progress, Maybe

The U.S. Copyright Office wants comments on

"the issues raised by 'orphan works,' i.e., copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or even impossible to locate. Concerns have been raised that the uncertainty surrounding ownership of such works might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from incorporating such works in new creative efforts or making such works available to the public."

This is wonderful news, and a sign of that people like Larry Lessig are making progress in educating the powers-that-be on the issues.

Public Knowledge has a good summary.

Finding Common Ground in Translation

I'm reminded of that by a call this morning from António Granado, who writes about science for Publico, a major daily newspaper, and posts frequently to his own journalism blog. He's reviewing We the Media, which has just been published in Portuguese.

We Americans tend to take for granted the ascendency of English. While English has become the international language of commerce, science and aviation -- and it's becoming a common second language around the globe -- cultures are holding onto what makes them unique. As they should.

One of the reasons I like to travel is meeting people who aren't like me in their own lands. We all refract life through human lenses, but our cultures determine a lot about who we are beyond that.

Open Thread

I'm on the road to Florida to attend and speak at the Poynter Institute's Web + 10 gathering. Feel free to talk below, but please behave nicely.

Will Congress Ban Government Payoffs of Journalists?

Editor & Publisher: Senators to Introduce 'Stop Government Propaganda Act'. In response to continued revelations of government-funded "journalism" -- ranging from the purported video news releases put out by the drug czar's office and the Department of Health and Human Services to the recently uncovered payments to columnists Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher,who flacked administration programs -- Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) will introduce a bill, The Stop Government Propaganda Act, in the Senate next week.

Of course, when Democrats introduced -- and got many, many co-sponsors for -- legislation mandating verifiable electronic voting, they couldn't get serious Republican support even for that.

This will be a test in many ways. If people can't support this bill, they are outright endorsing corruption of the press. Period.

California Regulators to Mobile Customers: Tough Luck

AP: California regulators suspend wireless customer protections. California utility regulators on Thursday suspended an 8-month-old crackdown on abusive practices in the wireless telephone industry, rebuffing the protests of consumer activists and the state's top law enforcement officials.

Help Lawmakers Know Who's Talking About Them

The folks at the Personal Democracy Forum have a fine idea: "to get Members of Congress more aware of when the blogosphere is talking about them."

It's not hard: Just go to the Library of Congress site for a list of URLs. Then link to the member's official site when mentioning him or her in a posting.

There's more on the forum site including this link to a ranking of who's getting the most links. Understand, this is a fairly crude ranking, but it's a start.

SBC Trying to Buy AT&T?

NY Times: SBC Said to Be in Talks to Buy AT&T. A deal, if reached, would be the final chapter in the 120-year history of AT&T, the first technological giant of the modern age and the original model for telecommunications companies worldwide. A deal would be a reunion of sorts, putting back together some of the largest pieces of the Ma Bell telephone monopoly, which was broken up in 1984.

The AT&T of today is a weak shadow of its former self. SBC is one of the powerhouses among the regional monopolies.

This deal, by itself, wouldn't do much to disrupt the marketplace immediately. But it's a harbinger of trouble.

The worry is on the data side. Voice is already moving into the data sphere as VoIP, and will someday be seen as a small add-on to data.

SBC is one of the most arrogant of the "Baby" (!) Bells. But all of them, assisted by an FCC that has been determined to let the phone and cable duopoly control data access, are moving to throttle the most important competitive market of the future -- broadband -- by insisting on absolute control over the wires they've installed based on government-granted monopolies. This local duopoly makes other kinds of consolidation look tame.

Someday, wireless broadband could help. But competing wireless systems have to connect to backbones and their local nodes. If the Bells can take over the companies that provide such data access, they can be anticompetitive in new ways.

I predict a slew of deals like this, where the regional Bells take over the long-distance and backbone companies, with little regulatory concern. Then we'll be even deeper in the soup.

Wal-Mart's Telling 'Statement'

On Wal-Mart's corporate website, under News and then Statements (the site makes it almost impossible to link directly inside, no doubt on purpose), is this gem:

---

---

As you may know, Wal-Mart makes an exception to its anti-union stance in that bastion of freedom, China. See this BBC story for the basic facts. (The Chinese "union" is controlled by the government, and "represents" workers accordingly.)

Then read Harold Myerson's Washington Post column (reg req) to understand the meaning of it all, which I summarize with this apt quote: " When a company such as Wal-Mart is so plainly comfortable with authoritarianism abroad, it tells you something about that company's values at home."

No Time for Big-Media Illusions

UPDATED

The Associated Press' Technology Editor, Frank Bajak, has written a nicely nuanced overview of last week's Harvard gathering on blogging, journalism and credibility. Key quote:

The bloggers aren't quite overrunning the newsroom, but they are engaging established media in keyboard-to-keyboard combat that's benefiting public discourse and making the journalism ``franchises'' more accountable.

Meanwhile, Slate's Jack Schafer debunks away but veers toward outright condescension in this piece about the same event. On a semi-private mail list for attendees (which I won't quote directly), the fur is flying, needless to say.

'This Internet Thing'

John Perry Barlow: The Intimate Planet. I feel as if the Global Village became real to me that night, and, indeed, it has become the Global Dinner Party. All at once. The small world has become the intimate world.

Changing Minds at Blog Conference

Jay Rosen: Big Wigs From the Blogging & Journalism Conference Say What They Found. Request from a blogger to the people who were at the Harvard conference on journalists, bloggers and trust. "Send me one thing you changed your mind about." Or at least learned. "You have 24 hours," I said. This is what they told me.

Newspapers: Open Your Archives

One of these days, a newspaper currently charging a premium for access to its article archives will do something bold: It will open the archives to the public -- free of charge but with keyword-based advertising at the margins.

I predict that the result will pleasantly surprise the bean-counters. There'll be a huge increase in traffic at first, once people realize they can read their local history without paying a fee. Eventually, though not instantly, the revenues will greatly exceed what the paper had been earning under the old system. Meanwhile, the expenses to run it will drop.

And, perhaps most important, the newspaper will have boosted its long-term place in the community. It will be seen, more than ever, as the authoritative place to go for some kinds of news and information -- because it will have become an information bedrock in this too-transient culture.

I've believed this move is necessary for newspapers for a long time. Almost three years ago, in an article for Library Journal called "Yesterday's Headlines," Rich Wiggins looked at the growing "archive digital divide," in which some people put things on the Web in a permanent way and others put them behind walls. He asked me what I thought. I replied, in part, "I have a feeling that the newspaper industry would be better served by opening up the archives and Googling them (and selling related ads based on keywords entered) than charging for individual searches."

I recognize the institutional and financial hurdles that will make it difficult to pull off in many companies today, even if they like the idea in a general sense. But I also believe it's almost inevitable.

Some major newspapers already do it. I would love to know how much the San Francisco Chronicle, which offers its archives at no charge (and loads search results with too many ads), get in revenue compared with the San Jose Mercury News, which charges for older articles.

For me, again, the heart of this issue is more about a newspaper's community role than revenue, even though I believe the right thing from the community standpoint is also the best from a financial one.

In an important recent posting on the PressThink blog, the Guardian's Simon Waldman explained "The Importance of Being Permanent" -- the notion that Web postings should have permanent, accessible Web addreses, or URLs. He wrote, in part:

Permanence means understanding that when you put something on the Web it should be there for ever: ideally in the same place for perpetuity. It means that if I link to it now, someone else can follow that link in two days, two weeks or two years' time. (I'm not going to lay out the business models in this piece, but I'm not excluding the possibility of pay-to-view; it's the position that counts, not the price.)

Waldman pointed out that the mainstream news industry, with a very few exceptions, doesn't see things this way. The consequence of the industry's tendency to push its older journalism behind a wall, where the initial links disappear and people now have to pay for access, is a loss of identity and diminution of authority.

Jay Rosen believes journalists should demand it, since their work is being hidden from most of the world as a result of such policies (he has more on this in a posting today. As he notes, last week's Harvard conference on Blogging, Journalism & Credibility produced a surprising consensus in favor of opening archives. Maybe that's not so unexpected after all, given that almost all of people in the room were professional journalists and bloggers: "content" types. (It's easy for me, as a proud former member of what newspaper publishers call "cost centers," to advise companies to give up a certain source of revenue for a speculative one.)

There are two immediate questions for publishers. First, how much money are they making today from pay-per-view archives? The Poynter Institute's Bill Mitchell said over the weekend (on a mailing list), "The range of news orgs generating significant revenue from archives with current biz models may be more limited than I had assumed."

That's good news. It means that the financial risk of changing the model is small in many, if not most cases.

Second, and related to that, what are the benefits of shifting to an open archive? I'm utterly in Waldman's camp that it would heighten a newspaper's authority, helping keep it at the center -- or not far from there -- of the community's civic agenda.

Every newspaper of any quality has published hundreds of articles that readers can find nowhere else and which bloggers, among others, would surely cite and point to as a vital part of the permanent record of a community. These include investigative pieces, certain features and other stories. If available upon publication at a permanent URL, they quickly rise in search engine rankings, where others will find them later.

I'm convinced that increasingly sophisticated Web advertising, especially keyword-based text ads, will create a revenue stream of some size for such stories. This will be especially the case when they've moved high enough in search-engine rankings to be found without searching the newspaper's site, but that's not crucial.

A locally targeted ad based on a keyword will bring new kinds of advertisers to the newspaper: small businesses that couldn't afford to buy space in the print edition. This is new money. It may not replace what papers are losing to the online competition, but it's worth something.

Many articles won't have that broad appeal. But they will have special meaning to smaller numbers of people who will want to point to them from their personal sites. They will reinforce people's sense that the newspaper is a medium of record in their lives. That's also worth something.

If I was a publisher with a pay-per-view archive, here's what I'd do:

1) Re-publish every article in the archives with a unique URL, outside the pay-wall. It would be helpful if the articles published since the newspaper went online could have the same URLs, but don't worry if that's too expensive; if the stories are important enough, they'll be found and pointed to. It'll just take a little longer.

2) Leave every new article on the Web at the URL it had upon publication. That's easier.

3) Encourage the readers to use the archives, with house advertisements, website notices e-mail to local librarians and other ways to get out the word.

4) Let local bloggers know that you welcome their links, and that you've made the change in part because they need it, too.

5) If a local blogger points to your article, use Trackback or other such technology to point back. (But be careful of link spamming.)

I don't know if there are ways to share revenues with people who point to news articles, or if that might raise some difficult ethical questions. I do know that the archives should be open in a way that encourages cooperation with bloggers and other Web publishers, even when you're competing in other ways.

Someday soon, some paper is going to try this. It'll be a great experiment. I believe it'll be a successful one, too.

Community Newspapers vs. Wal-Mart: Publisher Responds

In this recent posting I took a shot at a publisher's letter to Wal-Mart concerning an advertising and PR campaign being waged by the retail behemoth. I've updated with his response.

Promoting the California Housing Bubble

Passing through Los Angeles this morning, I bought a copy of the Orange County Register. On Page One was a huge promo to this story (reg req), which took up three inside pages.

The feature article, entitled "Real estate brought riches," tells of an immigrant family that bought a house about 13 years ago, sold it last fall for triple the purchase price and moved to Arizona with the profits to live the good life.

The family's tale, the Register said, was also "a story of wealth creation played out countless times across a county where the local median home price doubled in a mere four years to more than half-a-million bucks."

The piece disturbs me. It invites readers of modest means to throw everything into real estate and take enormous financial risks.

Maybe this is good advice. After all, California real estate has been appreciating for a long time, and in the past few years southern California prices have been absolutely soaring.

But maybe there's a housing bubble, as more and more experts worry. (I strongly believe there is a dangerous bubble in much of California.) Maybe the people who take this kind of burden on today -- at a time when a smaller percentage of households can afford a median-price home than ever and lenders are offering dangerously leveraged deals -- are going to lose everything.

There's one small cautionary element to the Register's story. It describes how the owners started borrowing against the appreciated value of the house and how that led to a worryingly higher debt load. The solution was to cash out and move to Arizona. Bingo, the lottery. Time to celebrate.

If we are in is a bubble, or even if there's a moderate correction, the newbies in this particular lottery are going to get absolutely screwed. This market may be a sucker's bet. Even a hint of that in the Register story would have been the responsible thing to do.

Newspaper Group Letter Insults Journalism

UPDATED (with publisher's response, at bottom)

The president of the National Newspapers Association has written a whiny letter to Wal-Mart. Mike Buffington relates a call from a PR person who

advised me that Wal-Mart representatives were "available for interviews" about the firms nationwide campaign to "set the record straight about the facts about Wal-Mart."

In addition to co-owning and operating four community newspapers in Northeast Georgia, I also currently serve as president of the National Newspapers Association. As both a newspaper publisher and as a spokesman for several thousand community newspapers in America, I want to let you know that I, and many of my fellow publishers, are insulted by this Wal-Mart PR effort.

The letter's logic runs roughly as follows:

1) Wal-Mart is under attack for its business practices.
2) Wal-Mart wants newspapers to cover its side.
3) But Wal-Mart is grossly stingy because it does little or no newspaper advertising.
4) So if Wal-Mart wants coverage it should buy advertisements.

I'm not a fan of Wal-Mart. I refuse to shop there specifically because of its business practices, and I found its recent newspaper ad campaign (which ignored the smaller papers Buffington is trying to defend) almost totally unpersuasive.

(To see the company's press release, go to this page, click on News Releases, then General News and the release titled, "Wal-Mart Launches Nationwide Campaign to Set the Record Straight." For reasons I can't fathom, Wal-Mart's site offers up on-the-fly Java server pages that make it impossible to link directly to the release.)

But Buffington may not have realized how insulting his letter is to the people who do journalism -- and to his customers. This letter strongly implies a "you pay or we don't cover you" attitude. What he calls "free PR" is nothing of the kind. It's one part of a story, and it's worth covering no matter who puts the ads in the paper.

The public is already skeptical of newspaper publishers' motives. It's hard enough to be a reporter these days, but letters like this one give credence to people's more cynical assumptions.

---

Buffington responds:

The issue here isn't news vs. advertising; it's simply an attempt to manipulate PR in community newspapers.

At the corporate level, Wal-Mart has made it clear that it does not see value in advertising in community newspapers. Can't argue with that, it's their money and they've been successful without us.

But to take that attitude, then expect community newspapers to be a free tool in a political PR campaign, smacks of corporate arrogance.

Wal-Mart could have bought 3 page ads in our newspaper and I still wouldn't run their PR stuff. It isn't relevant to our market. And I can't be bought, period.

But ask yourself this: Wal-Mart did buy page ads in major metro newspapers across the nation with their PR message and many of those newspapers did write high-profile news articles about the firm's PR campaign.

Was there a tacit link between those news stories in metro newspapers and the Wal-Mart ads?

Probably not, but it's interesting that Wal-Mart paid to run its message in those urban markets, many of which don't have Wal-Mart stores in their core area, but they didn't see value in running the ad in suburban and rural markets, the heartland of their company.

Why was that?

My theory is that this PR campaign is really about Corporate America talking to Corporate America. The goal isn't to communicate with Wal-Mart customers in the rural and suburban areas stores are located, but rather to sell their PR to opinion-makers at the state and corporate levels. Talking with customers is, I think, a secondary consideration.

That's fine, but the company shouldn't have insulted community newspapers in the process. Don't go to the metro areas and buy advertising in big corporate newspapers, but expect mom-and-pop newspapers to dish out the same stuff as free PR. We have higher standards than that.

Perhaps Wal-Mart didn't intend to send such an arrogant message, but it did. And frankly, I don't think very many community newspaper publishers in America have much respect for a firm that looks down its corporate nose at our profession.

That 'Liberal' Mainstream Media (TV News Edition)

See this "inventory" of inauguration coverage for some interesting comparisons.

Johnny Carson and An Era Remembered

Jeff Jarvis marks the death of Johnny Carson, and has an important observation:

Carson also represented the golden age of America's shared experience in media. That era lasted about three decades, from the late '50s to the late '80s, when the three networks turned most cities into one-newspaper towns and we all watched the same thing. I don't regret that era dying; it means we now have more choice and choice equals control. But it was a unique time in our culture, when popular culture became a common platform, a common touchstone for Americans.

Torture and the Blogosphere

Frank Rich (NY Times): On Television, Torture Takes a Holiday. But a not-so-funny thing happened to the Graner case on its way to trial. Since the early bombshells from Abu Ghraib last year, the torture story has all but vanished from television, even as there have been continued revelations in the major newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. If a story isn't on TV in America, it doesn't exist in our culture.

America's descent into a political, tactical and moral swamp -- our use and tacit approval of torture -- will someday be seen as a stain on our national honor. (Never mind that it's basically counterproductive.) Television news' abandonment of this story will be seen as a stain on a once-serious part of the press.

It's not as if this matter is closed. The show trials of people -- who are plainly guilty -- low on the command chain look as much like a coverup as an attempt to get to the truth. And the Bush administration is doing everything it can to keep its options wide open. In confirmation hearings, attorney general designate Alberto Gonzales disclaimed torture but remained infinitely vague about what kinds of interrogation are beyond the pale -- and, of course, most of the spineless Democrats and who-cares Republicans refused to pin him down. This was in keeping with the administration's ongoing strategy on this issue: Use methods that amount to torture, rationalize it with Orwellian language that calls it something else and then insist that torture is wrong.

Some newspapers and magazines have stayed on the story, as Rich notes, and they deserve great credit for sticking with an issue that obviously makes Americans uncomfortable, as it should. This is a situation that demands a swarm of blogging outrage as well.

Bloggers of various political persuasions have shown their ability to keep alive stories that the major media found insufficiently newsworthy. The right-wing bloggers are on the Bush administration's side on this issue, for the most part. I'm sorry about that, because our practices should be anathema across the spectrum. (South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former military lawyer, has been an exception (Frontline interview) to the lockstep fealty of Bush supporters.)

I hope bloggers in the center and on the left will stay on this. They need to be as relentless about a continuing scandal as the RatherGate folks were in exposing CBS News' shoddy journalism. TV's willful failures, once again, are the blogosphere's opportunity.

Almost Home...

I got on what must have been one of the last flights out of Boston last night. After not being able to go through Chicago back to California, due to Midwest storms, I was booked on an evening nonstop to San Francisco. I noticed a flight leaving for San Diego about 90 minutes earlier and asked to be put on that one, which the airline did. Turned out that the San Francisco flight got canceled.

An inexpensive overnight stay (I'm turning into a big fan of the Hotwire service, which has been a reliable way to get decent hotel rooms for a low price) in San Diego and a commuter plane hop to LAX, I'm waiting for my connection back to San Francisco. I'll be home by 10:30 this morning, and happy to be there.

I frequently tell people how much I miss the seasons in New England. But I don't miss blizzards like the one they're having in Boston today.

In other circumstances I'd be grumpy about this detour and overnight layover. Right now I'm feeling lucky.

On the Road (I Hope)

UPDATED

I'm at Logan Airport in Boston, waiting for a flight to Chicago San Diego and then to California San Francisco. My original schedule was to head back tomorrow, but the whopper storm approaching here is expected to dump a foot or two of snow amid high winds (can you say 8-foot snowdrifts?).

The airline suggested getting out while the getting was good.

This is the kind of advice I tend to take.

UPDATE: Still on the ground, 3 hours after my original departure time. Half the flights in and out are canceled at this point. I have a sneaking suspicion I'll be checking back into the hotel in Cambridge this evening...

It's amazing to hear some passengers complaining about these problems. Like the airline people can do something about the weather...sheesh.

(Enhanced photo via NOAA)

American ISPs Kicking Out Iranian Bloggers?

Hoder says it looks that way. WTF?

Buzz-Makers: More Disclosure, Please

Newsweek: The Connected Get More Connected. This month, 100 of Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, bloggers and promoters will begin receiving cool new stuff for free, delivered straight to their homes and offices. In return, these movers and shakers promise to sample the products and offer feedback to the their manufacturers. The companies hope that, if the mood strikes, the Silicon Valley 100 will chat up, blog on, or just plain recommend the products to friends and colleagues, generating that most invaluable of currencies: buzz.

This is oddly creepy. Will the people getting this stuff will routinely tell people they've gotten it for free? (Glad to see that Joi Ito says he will...)

How does this differ from the stuff that shows up in news organizations' newsrooms all the time, from companies hoping to get reviews of their products? When writing a tech column, for example, I got ridiculous amounts of software, back when it came in boxes. (I went out and bought copies of the stuff I decided to use in everyday ways.) Sportswriters don't pay to cover the games. Movie reviewers go to private screenings. And so on.

What bothers me is the lack of transparency (apart from Brad Stone's scoop in getting the story) in this case. It's just an extension of a concept of what some call "buzz marketing" -- getting allegedly "regular people" to tout products without disclosing the practice.

I hope the people named in this story -- some of whom are friends of mine -- will decide either to disclose what they're doing, or bow out of this exercise entirely.

Search: Sometimes You Want Just One Result

Take a look at Answers.com, a search engine and (Windows and Macintosh) stand-alone desktop application that returns results from specific information sources ranging from dictionaries to Wikipedia.

I would love to see a Palm OS version of this.

(Disclosure: The company's founder and CEO, Bob Rosenschein, is a friend.)

'Open Source' Radio Journalism

CBC Radio's Tod Maffin (funny URL) is trying an interesting experiment in radio journalism. In a show about the open-source movement, he's basically asking his listeners to help him with the reporting. He interviewed me last evening for the piece, and (gulp) posted the audio of the entire interview.

For more, see the Open Source Radio blog.

Education in New Journalism

There's plainly a need for greater education of what I've been calling the "former audience," the people who until recently have been nothing but consumers of news. They now have greater opportunity to put together news reports, from a variety of sources, replacing the static and linear products of a manufacturing age of news. More important, they can be part of the process: part of a conversation and a community. Many will be.

Education and assistance to the former audience will be a piece of the enterprise I'm going to be creating, and I'm all ears on how to approach it.

Much more on this in days ahead...

'Transparent Hearsay'

Interesting essay by Jon Garfunkel about transparent hearsay, an ironic nomenclature for his look at serious questions of parsing conversations -- and people, in a sense.

Credibility on the Table

I'm at the Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference at Harvard's Kennedy School.

If you're interested there'll be a live Webcast here.

Since other people are blogging this, I'll mainly listen.

The End of Objectivity (Version 0.91)

UPDATED

(This is a draft. Over time I hope, with your help, to revise this into a better document. Let me know what you think.)

Maybe it's time to say a fond farewell to an old canon of journalism: objectivity. But it will never be time to kiss off the values and principles that undergird the idea.

Objectivity is a construct of recent times. One reason for its rise in the journalism sphere has been the consolidation of newspapers and television into monopolies and oligopolies in the past half-century. If one voice overwhelms all the others, there is a public interest in playing stories as straight as possible -- not favoring one side over the other (or others, to be more precise, as there are rarely just two sides to any issue).

There were good business reasons to be "objective," too, not least that a newspaper didn't want to make large parts of its community angry. And, no doubt, libel law has played a role, too. If a publication could say it "got both sides," perhaps a libel plaintiff would have more trouble winning.

Again, the idea of objectivity is a worthy one. But we are human. We have biases and backgrounds and a variety of conflicts that we bring to our jobs every day.

I'd like to toss out objectivity as a goal, however, and replace it with four other notions that may add up to the same thing. They are pillars of good journalism: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency.

The lines separating them are not always clear. They are open to wide interpretation, and are therefore loaded with nuance in themselves. But I think they are a useful way to approach quality journalism. They are, moreover, easier to achieve in an online setting.

Thoroughness

When I was a reporter and, later, a columnist, my first goal was to learn as much as I could. After all, gathering facts and opinions is the foundation of reporting. I liked it best when I felt I had left 95 percent of what I'd learned out of the final piece. The best reporters I know always want to make one more call, check with one more source. (The last question I ask at all interviews is, "Who else should I talk with about this?"

Today, thoroughness means more than asking questions of the people in our Rolodexes (circular or virtual). It means, whenever possible, asking our readers for their input, as I did when I wrote my book (and other authors are doing on theirs). Competitive pressures tend to make this a rare request, but I'm convinced that more journalists will adopt it.

Accuracy

Get your facts straight.

Say what you don't know, not just what you do. (If the reader/listener/viewer does know what you don't, you've just invited him/her to fill you in.)

Fairness

This one is as difficult, in practice, as accuracy is simple. Fairness is often in the eye of the beholder. But even here I think a few principles may universally apply.

Fairness means, among other things, listening to different viewpoints, and incorporating them into the journalism. It does not mean parroting lies or distortions to achieve that lazy equivalence that leads some journalists to get opposing quotes when the facts overwhelmingly support one side.

Fairness is also about letting people respond when they believe you are wrong. Again, this is much easier online than in a print publication, much less a broadcast.

Ultimately, fairness emerges from a state of mind. We should be aware of what drives us, and always willing to listen to those who disagree. The first rule of having a conversation is to listen -- and I know I learn more from people who think I'm wrong than from those who agree with me.

Transparency

Disclosure is gaining currency as an addition to journalism. It's easier said than done, of course.

No one can plausibly argue with the idea that journalists need to disclose certain things, such as financial conflicts of interest. But to what extent? Should journalists of all kinds be expected to make their lives open books? How open?

Personal biases, even unconscious ones, affect the journalism as well. I'm an American, brought up in with certain beliefs that many folks in other lands (and some in this one) flatly reject. I need to be aware of the things I take for granted, and to periodically challenge some of them, as I do my work.

Another way to be transparent is in the way we present a story. We should link to source material as much as possible, bolstering what we tell people with close-to-the-ground facts and data. (Maybe this is part of accuracy or thoroughness, but it seems to fit here, too.)

To the extent that we make thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency the pillars of journalism, we can get a long way toward the worthy goal of helping our audiences/collaborators. I don't claim it's easy, but I do think it's worth the effort.

The Business Model for Tomorrow's Journalism

Jeff Jarvis has posted some smart notes on the financial future of the news business. Part One and Part 2.

Down Memory Lane...

Halley Suitt interviewed me for IT Conversations' Memory Lane program. Hope I was relatively coherent.

PR and the Williams Affair

Jay Rosen: Bloggers Are Missing in Action as Ketchum Tests the Conscience of PR. Bloggers are supposed to be a little more curious than most. They are supposed to apply a second degree of scrutiny when they are doing "their job" in the new ecosystem of news. When the press pack goes that-a-way they ought to look this-a-way. And they should be alert to events in the moral life of the people whose world they chronicle.

Pointing to the Original

Over at ZDNet, David Berlind takes a deeper look at the transparency issue. He notes a posting that included an MP3 audio link of a key interview he did for the story. It's a fine idea.

In an ideal world I'd like to have had access to a full transcript as well, because I a) can read faster than I can listen; and b) I can quote more easily from text than audio. But that's asking a lot, partly because it's not cheap to get transcripts. Maybe someone will create a transcript of the audio file and post it somewhere else.

The Pentagon posts transcripts of major interviews with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and has for some time. For example, there's this one.

But when people do this, they should be consistent. The Pentagon deleted a section in a Washington Post interview, and the Post promptly posted its own transcript containing the missing lines. The Pentagon cost itself some credibility in this case, after gaining it with its prior transparency.

Ending One Fruitless Debate

Jay Rosen announces that "Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over" -- and of course it is.

I've generally refused even to address this question in the last few years. People would ask if bloggers were journalists, and I'd roll my eyes, saying, "Some are and some aren't."

Jay says this and much more. His essay, part of a lead-up to a conference this weekend at Harvard, gets to the really interesting question: Once we get over the silly us-versus-them stuff, what can we do -- together -- to help make journalism, in whatever form, remain the essential component of a free society that it must be.

I have more to say on all of this, but I'm chock full of meetings today, so postings will be light until much later. Do read Jay's essay in the meantime.

Letting Them Eat Cake, and Bullets

The spectacle of George W. Bush and his friends celebrating (Reuters) his election so expensively this week is one of those revealing moments in history. The announced spending of $40 million just on the parties is undoubtedly less than the actual amount, but even if it's accurate it's a staggeringly high number in such a time when even a tiny bit of sobriety would have been appreciated.

Meanwhile: Soldiers in Iraq still go without sufficient supplies. The tsunami survivors are just starting to pick up their lives. African warlords slaughter their people. America's middle class continues to shrink toward insignificance. And so on.

An inauguration is an event that celebrates the best of America: the peaceful transfer of power when a new president takes office, and the continuation of the republic's stable form of government on all cases, including the one this week when the president gets another term. And no one begrudges an appropriate demonstration of joy by the victors.

What Bush and his allies are doing is just plain vulgar, particularly in wartime. They have no sense of proportion, as they've demonstrated so many times before. But this is over the top. Bush's press secretary says the object of this over-the-top scene is to "celebrate freedom." No, it's a mockery.

A Closer Look at the Greensboro News Experiment

UPDATED

The local business journal in Greensboro, N.C., has an in-depth article about the local newspaper's decision to become much more interactive with its readers. This experiment is getting more interesting all the time.

UPDATE: Ed Cone notes a local weblog aggregator that is making its own inroads in the market.

Guess It Was Inevitable: The Blog T-Shirt

The small print on the t-shirt begins: "She wanted to stop reading it -- but she had nothing better to do! Produced by average people who seem to think their lives are interesting."

Mugs and mouse pads available, too.

I'll pass..

Future of News: A Distributed Look

A Slashdot reader notes that the Net gives news consumers some advantages over traditional media, "as the user has more control over what to view and when to view it. But how does the future of this utopia look?"

An engaging discussion, looking at matters such as the echo-chamber effect and Darwinistic traits in the news process, ensues. (Slashdot general advice: set your comment filter to 2 for mostly higher quality remarks).

Note, this thread doesn't delve much into the citizen-created journalism I'm pushing here. Bur for most people, just being able to get a better report than they've been getting from traditional sources is an important step forward.

Propaganda Starts at the Top

David Shaw (LA Times; reg req): Subverting the press with propaganda on the rise. In a week when the big media story has been the report on how CBS and "60 Minutes" screwed up a story on Bush's National Guard service, I've been surprised by the relatively little attention given to the Armstrong Williams story. This is not to minimize in any way the shamefully unprofessional behavior of CBS. But the Bush administration has behaved even more shamefully — consistently — and used our tax dollars to do so.

Your News, Your Way

Take Back the News calls itself a news sharing community (looks like it's using the Drupal content-management system). Interesting ideas here.

Steve's Apple Bytes

My older, wiser brother Steve has a smart take on Apple's Macworld Expo announcements, even though I'm still right (ahem) about the "trade secrets" question...

Watched by Bloggers, and Humbled

In a USA Today column, Phil Meyer, journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, says the major media are being more "closely watched" -- in large part by bloggers -- and humbled in the process.

What the Smart Money Wonders

I had breakfast this morning with a couple of private-equity investors who are looking into the media field. They, like many other people, are wondering what's going on with grassroots journalism.

I said several times (and they concurred) that we need sustainable businesses in this arena, not get-rich-quick schemes like the ones that pervaded the Internet bubble days. There will be such businesses. But I strongly suspect the revenue models won't be much like the ones we relied on in the monopoly-media age.

Lazy Equivalence on Journalism Ethics

UPDATED

The WSJ fell into what I call the "lazy equivalence" trap in this story today about two bloggers who got paid as consultants by the Dean presidential campaign. The article seeks to connect these payments with the vastly more serious Armstrong Williams payola scandal, in which the Bush administration paid the right-wing commentator more than $240,000 to promote an education policy.

There's are differences, big ones. Such as: One of the bloggers shut down postings when he moved to Vermont to join the campaign, and the other prominently (on his homepage) disclosed that he was consulting. Williams and his backers did not disclose anything until USA Today outed his conflict of interest. And the Williams affair involved the White House itself, not merely a wannabe candidate for the office. You and I -- taxpayers -- got the bill for this sleaze.

(Glenn Reynolds writes much more on this, and makes some good points. He also links to all of the players, who respond to him and each other.)

The question of overall ethics is important, however, and we all need to focus on it.

I'd hope that bloggers wouldn't take these kinds of payments at all, at least if they're assuming a journalistic role. But disclosure is the absolute least that we need in this evolving culture; tell folks what's happening, as Kos was doing.

Of course, there are wrinkles to consider, including that old journalistic revenue standby: advertising. Suppose a blogger just takes the payment in the form of ads. How different is that?

In theory, advertising is transparent. The relationship is right in front of the reader/listener/viewer.

But there are obvious ways to game that system, too. I know of no rules -- in any media -- obliging people to disclose how much they're getting from a specific advertiser. (Publications have semi-pubic rate sheets, but as far as I know they aren't prohibited from taking more than what they've requested; someone please correct me if this is wrong.) As you see, this gets complicated fast.

News organizations have myriad conflicts of interest in other ways, such as when senior executives are members of local organizations that lobby governments on various issues. And as has been chronicled repeatedly by people like Jim Fallows, some big-time journalists routinely collect huge paychecks giving speeches on the corporate circuit. That's an ongoing scandal.

What's my policy? When I was at the Mercury News, our ethics rules wisely prohibited such payments (except when giving talks or instruction to journalism groups, which can't afford big fees in any case). Since leaving, I've agreed to give several talks to Silicon Valley companies about the topics raised in We the Media, which are of increasingly keen interest to the corporate world; I've concluded that it's still not appropriate for me to accept such fees even now, given my intention to keep doing journalism.

Exclusives are Fun, Too

Kevin Marks gives me more credit than I deserve in this Many to Many posting, where he notes the traditional journalistic model of going for an exclusive scoop. He says some journalists are thinking how to make stories more inclusive: "measuring success by how many people they bring into the conversation, and they recognise it doesn't necessarily start with them."

This was with most of the things I used to work on when I was writing a regular column. I was writing about people, issues and organizations after the news had already come out -- trying to put it into perspective with my own take on the topic.

But I also hungered for the scoops. And when I got something all by myself, which happened periodically, I loved the feeling.

This is a valuable part of journalistic competition. It is surviving the shift we're seeing from Big Media dominance to a more synergistic system including the rest of us. Scoops will continue to occur -- though they'll take different forms, and the scoop will last for about five minutes before it spreads widely -- and that's a good thing.

Meanwhile, the involvement of more people in the conversation is the big, and most important, shift of all. This definitely doesn't start with us, or end with us. It continues, and grows.

Open Thread

Heading to New York, for some meetings over the next several days. If anyone has something to say about grassroots journalism, feel free to post below.

Why CBS Should Have Been Smarter

Jay Rosen asks why (scroll down) I used the word "smarter" in a recent posting about the CBS News debacle, in which I said, in part: "It would have been smarter for CBS to thank, not make semi-snide remarks about, the bloggers who raised the important questions about the authenticity of the memos. But you can't have everything."

Like many other people, I wish that CBS would take to heart the grassroots developments in our craft. That would have been wise (and smart).

But I don't think CBS is, today, institutionally capable of truly understanding the value of listening to its audience -- of grasping how much help the audience can be in the journalistic process. The network's offhanded dismissal of the grassroots continues even now. (I know there are individual people at CBS who do get it. But they are not running things.) That said, it would have been at least tactically smart for CBS to have acknowledged the grassroots component of this debacle. Common-sense PR should have made this obvious. Is this a cynical comment on my part? I guess so, but I hate to see the network compounding the damage so unnecessarily, in part because (unlike some in the blog world) I still value the good stuff CBS does.

CBS News' journalistic contributions have been enormous over the years. It would be tragic if this situation causes further deterioration of a once-great enterprise, which still does important work.

Eventually, the network will figure all this out. I hope that won't be too late.

The 'Yahoo Problem' and a Solution

UPDATED

Dave Winer has put his finger on a budding problem:

Yahoo sends emails to bloggers with RSS feeds saying, hey if you put this icon on your weblog you'll get more subscribers. It's true you will. Then Feedster says the same thing, and Bloglines, etc etc.

His answer: more cooperation. Good idea; hope the community will work on something like this.

UPDATE: Other folks have other ideas.

Grassroots Journalism and the Law

I'm happy to report that the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society has named me as a Fellow for the upcoming year. The center has been doing important work in understanding how law intersects with the online world, and I hope to spend some serious time in the next few months on key issues.

One such issue is copyright. The entertainment cartel seeks to ban or control technologies that might be used for infringing purposes even when those technologies, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, have entirely legitimate purposes. P2P is an absolute necessity for grassroots journalism's survival, as are other technologies that are now or may soon be in jeopardy from these attacks.

Another big issue is defamation. Bloggers have no more right to defame people than mass-media journalists, for example; we are responsible for our words. We need to help people understand what's legitimate and what's not.

But bloggers and other grassroots journalists typically have far fewer resources to fight back when unfairly treated, such as a baseless libel suit or other legal action that is designed to -- or has the effect of -- attacking free speech.

Led by Robert Cox, the new Media Bloggers Association (I'm a charter member) has been working on this already. It's launching a Legal Defense Fund for bloggers, a good first step. Grassroots media could be stifled if we don't figure this out.

I hope to pull together a day-long conference at Stanford later this year, bringing in experts in copyright and First Amendment law, grassroots journalists and others who care about this subject. If you might want to be part of this or help sponsor it, let me know.

Apple's Latest Stuff

Well, the rumor sites were pretty much on-target. Apple introduced a thumb-drive kind of iPod, a $500 desktop computer (that will be considerably more expensive to make it useful) and some updates on its software.

CNet has comprehensive coverage, as do Macintouch and a host of other sites.

By the way, it's good to see that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is challenging Apple's abusive lawsuits against grassroots-journalism sites that dared to publish what insiders had told them.

Free Speech Belongs to Us All

In a thought-provoking blog posting, Mitch Ratcliffe discusses the ever-relevant topic of journalists and their conflicts of interest. But he goes off the rails briefly when he says: "Bloggers simply haven't had enough time to fuck up as royally as those who have been granted First Amendment protection for a couple centuries."

I understand what Mitch means, but I want to remind everyone that it isn't just journalists who've enjoyed free speech through American history. We all have, here in America.

The First Amendment does mention the press -- and thank goodness that it does. But in a time when the lines are blurring between journalists and the rest of us, remember that freedom of speech (and religion and the right to peaceful assembly, etc.) belongs to everyone. It is the foundation of liberty.

CBS News' Half-Regrets

I've been reading the CBS News report (big PDF) on what some call "Rather-gate" -- the poor journalistic practices that led the network's news division to do insufficient due diligence in last fall's report on George Bush's National Guard service. The report is being picked to pieces by anti-CBS folks, but I think it's a sign of progress that the network came relatively clean on its failings -- and then fired some of the people responsible.

It would have been smarter for CBS to thank, not make semi-snide remarks about, the bloggers who raised the important questions about the authenticity of the memos. But you can't have everything.

CNN Does RSS

Another big media operation sees the light. Excellent.

New Voices Wanted in Citizen Journalism

New Voices, a "pioneering program to seed innovative citizen media ventures around the country," has some money available for promising new ventures. Details here.

Permanence Matters

Over at Jay Rosen's PressThink blog, the Guardian's Simon Waldman has published an important essay, "The Importance of Being Permanent," in which he talks at length about why it's so important to keep links alive on the Web. Sample:

Permanence means understanding that when you put something on the Web it should be there for ever: ideally in the same place for perpetuity. It means that if I link to it now, someone else can follow that link in two days, two weeks or two years' time. (I'm not going to lay out the business models in this piece, but I'm not excluding the possibility of pay-to-view; it's the position that counts, not the price.)

This is an alien concept to many people in the news industry, which creates work designed to appear in a particular place at a particular time. But permanence is critical to understanding the real challenges and potential for online publishing.

Terrific stuff, and everyone in the news business should read it.

Dave Winer Defends Bill Gates, Sort Of

Dave Winer asks some questions in the wake of my posting about Bill Gates' recent interview, in which Gates called people who want balance in intellectual property laws "communists." (Dave calls them "neo-communists who want musicians to give their work away," so if I understand him correctly he agrees with Gates on this, even though that language largely misrepresents the beliefs of people who are trying to restore copyright fairness.)

(UPDATE: Dave strongly disagrees with my interpretation of how he characterized Gates' statement; see comments below.)

As Dave points out, Gates is busy trying to persuade Hollywood that Microsoft is the best friend of the entertainment industry. Indeed, Microsoft's DRM moves are in large part designed to assist copyright holders in locking down everything that moves. Of course, Hollywood would restrict the development of new technology that could be used for infringing purposes, even when it has totally legitimate uses; someday this could bite Microsoft, too.

Dave is also correct that Steve Jobs has been doing some of the same things, though Apple has at least attempted to find some balance for the users, as opposed to totally bending over for the cartel.

Contrary to Dave's assertion, however, Jobs isn't getting a free ride on this, at least not from me. I've gone after Apple on many occasions for its own tendencies toward control-freakery, most recently this posting the other day. And in my book I said this:

"Even Apple has jumped aboard the DRM train, though not with the same zeal Microsoft has shown. Apple’s iTunes Music Store, which sells songs, encodes them in a format that can’t easily be converted to the wide-open MP3 or OGG formats. The DRM scheme, instituted because the music industry demanded it, gives Apple users more freedom to copy songs among different devices than we saw in prior DRM schemes. But it tends to penalize some of Apple’s best customers -- people who repeatedly buy new Macs. An iTunes Music Store customer can listen to the songs on five computers, but managing authorizations can be a hassle. It’s also important to remember that what freedoms Apple gives today can disappear tomorrow."

(In an end-note, I described how Apple had subsequently changed the iPod's' functions in a way that both added and subtracted user freedoms.)

Dave also asks if I'd criticize the people with whom I now have business relationships. If I felt sufficiently strongly about something, I would -- though at least on the question at issue here we share pretty much congruent views (Mitch Kapor, the Omidyar Network and Tim O'Reilly all support the goals of Creative Commmons, for example). But, as was the case when I wrote about Knight-Ridder while employed by that company, anything I say about these folks or enterprises would need to be taken by a reader with a grain of salt, because of the business relationships. This is always true when a journalist covers a person or organization with which he or his employer has such a relationship, and it always will be. Transparency is a useful thing, but readers also need to be cautious.

Iran Government Censors Blogs

Hoder reports:

Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling.

They have also ordered to filter Orkut, Yahoo Personals and some other popular dating and social networking websites.

This is bad news. Iran's previous willingness to let the blogosphere emerge was a sign of progress. Now the regime is showing its fear of people's voices.

I hope some proxy servers and other workarounds get put into place quickly.

KPFK Interview

I'm heading over to KPFK radio in North Hollywood, for an interview on a show called "Digital Village" -- it runs live in LA from 11-12 this morning.

My Troll Follows Me Here

UPDATED

I'm removing a series of comments from a troll who haunted my old blog and has followed me here.

I will not permit this site to be taken over by these kinds of folks. Period.

UPDATE: If the person whose comments I've deleted sends me an email, I'll unblock that IP address. Several people say I've banned someone using a real name, though the comments were over a line I won't let people cross here.

I want real discussions, and don't mind serious disagreement with what I say. I do mind personal attacks and won't tolerate them.

The Ethics of Blogging

As we get ready for the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference at Harvard in two weeks, the Poynter Institute's Bill Mitchell weighs in with some important questions. I'll be posting a comment, and encourage others to do so as well.

Bush Administration Invents 'News' and Pays Journalist

USA Today: Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law. Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.

Washington Post: Drug Control Office Faulted For Issuing Fake News Tapes. Shortly before last year's Super Bowl, local news stations across the country aired a story by Mike Morris describing plans for a new White House ad campaign on the dangers of drug abuse. What viewers did not know was that Morris is not a journalist and his "report" was produced by the government, actions that constituted illegal "covert propaganda," according to an investigation by the Government Accountability Office.

Given this administration's fondness for fiscal recklessness, war-inducing lies, torture, attacks on civil-liberties and other misdeeds, these seem like minor matters. But the Bush White House's contempt for honest journalism is really something to behold. Worse, it's clear that the adminstration honchos believe the public doesn't care -- and that officials consider professional journalists to be utterly helpless in making anyone care.

Williams' previously undisclosed money-grubbing is pathetic, and worse. The National Association of Black Journalists has condemned his actions, and at least one news syndicate is dumping him (Poynter Online).

But keep in mind that news organizations, as opposed to individual "journalists," have taken equally sleazy money from the government in the past. As Salon reported in 2000, "At least six major U.S. magazines have submitted anti-drug articles they have published over the past year to the government's Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in an attempt to qualify for thousands of dollars of financial credits under the same federal advertising program that has benefited the television networks."

In an age when TV news networks shill for the White House, I suppose we shouldn't be entirely surprised by any of this stuff. But it's pretty depressing nonetheless.

NY Times to Charge for Online Viewing?

Reuters: New York Times Mulls Charging Web Readers. According to the upcoming issue of BusinessWeek magazine, whose cover story focuses on The New York Times Co., an internal debate has been raging at the newspaper over whether its online edition, which had about 18.5 million unique monthly visitors as of November, should adopt a subscription fee.

I'd probably pay. Then again, I've been paying for Web journalism for years, for such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Salon and Consumer Reports (I even paid for Slate when it was charging). Part of my motivation has been to support online journalism. But part has been the value I received.

Would you pay for the Times online?

More Anti-Camera Absurdity

New York City is about to ban "unauthorized" use of cameras in the subways, as per this rule (170k pdf):

1050.9.c. No photograph, film or video recording shall be made or taken on or in any conveyance or facility by any person, except members of the press holding valid press identification cards issued by the New York City Police Department or by others duly authorized in writing to engage in such activity by the authority. All photographic activity must be conducted in accordance with the provisions of this Part.

The absurdity is pointed out by a local photographer in a story in today's NY Times. She says:

"The bizarre bureaucratic mind somehow thinks a terrorist needs to be standing there with a visible camera to figure out a place to put a bomb, when obviously technology has reached a point where tiny little video cameras can have eyeballs peering out from your buttonhole."

And, of course, the rule makes the increasingly bogus distinction between amateurs and professionals.

To those who will now say in the comments that the NYC officials are only doing what's necessary to combat terrorism, I have a question. What about the thousands upon thousands of subway pictures already out there? As the Times story notes, the proposed photo ban coincides with new books and exhibitions of, yes, subway photos.

I don't doubt that some officials believe they're making life just a wee bit harder for terrorists, and therefore that the ban must somehow be acceptable. The bureaucratic mind today is paralyzed with being the scapegoat after the next attack on our soil, which is inevitable.

There's no serious risk assessment going on here, largely because technology makes it just about impossible to stop people from taking pictures for whatever reason. Worse, this rule is a step toward something that should worry all of us. When journalists need licenses -- when people need the government's permission to ask the kinds of questions journalists (and concerned citizens) ask every day, the government has new kinds of power.

(Photo thumbnail via nycsubway.org)

Tsunami and Citizen Journalism's First Draft

I was getting ready to write a long piece about the South Asia catastrophe's effect on citizen journalism, when the Poynter Institute's Steve Outing called to discuss it for a piece he was writing. He quoted me at length in his piece, and captured the important points. I called the tsunami horror a turning point, because it brought the grassroots front and center in an even more powerful way than occurred on and after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Read Steve's piece here.

I'd add this: We used to call mainstream journalism the "first draft of history." Now, I'd argue, much of that first draft is being written by citizen journalists. And what they're telling us is powerful indeed.

Truth and Bill Gates

UPDATED

CNet's interview with Bill Gates has any number of howlers, but a couple of them stand out.

He claims, for example, that Internet Explorer is the best browser. Insulting people's intelligence is par for the course for Gates, but this one is beyond laughable.

More serious, and ugly, is Gates' attack on people who want to restore a modicum of balance to today's grossly tilted system of intellectual property. He snidely dismisses "some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."

The purity of this lie is remarkable. Even the most ardent of the free-software folks are not trying to remove the incentive to be creative. They believe in a different kind of incentive, just not the mercenary one that motivates Bill Gates.

The larger truth -- a principle for which Gates so frequently demonstrates such contempt -- is that the vast, vast majority of people who find fault with today's system still want to reward creators for their work, financially and otherwise. But we also want a system that balances the rights of creators with the rights and needs of the larger society.

Gates and his allies in the entertainment cartel want absolute control. For them, fair use and other societal benefits are what the intellectual property holders deem them to be. (And when it comes to patents, Gates and his company are becoming some of the worst bullies on the block, abusing a system that increasingly has little to do with actual innovation.)

Tonight I'm going to a party celebrating the second anniversary of Creative Commons, an organization that uses "private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses." That such an organization is needed so badly is testament to the outrageous imbalance in today's copyright regime.

Gates' defenders will claim that he was referring to a tiny group of people in his attack. But he's too smart, too media-savvy, not to have known what a broad brush he was wielding. His latest propaganda is shameful, but not a surprise.

UPDATE: BoingBoing has a couple of great postings pointing to "Creative Commies" art responding to Gates' crapola. See this and this.

---

A commenter named Leo (see below) was puzzled about my comment that there are incentives to create other than mercenary motives. I responded:

There are many other incentives than financial ones. People volunteer their services all the time, not looking for payment (ever heard of the barn-raising or a volunteer fire department in a small town, for example?). People create art all the time without regard to payment. What's the business model for community theater? There isn't one in the standard sense. The purpose is to enrich a community's cultural life, and to give amateur actors a way to go on stage and fulfill something in their own lives.

The open-source software folks are similarly committed to producing something valuable without direct payment to themselves. Some are making a living off it by providing ancillary services. Others do it because they believe in the principle.

Grassroots journalism will rely in some ways on this concept. If the copyright cartel controls the distribution and the tools of creation -- has veto power over technology we need to make this happen -- then tomorrow's journalism will be partly stifled before it gets off the ground.

To follow the logic of people like Bill Gates, we should ban voluntarism because, after all, there are companies that would sell us the services. It's an absurd notion.

What's more, Bill Gates knows that markets fail. That why he's putting so much money into his philanthropy to help improve public health, especially in the developing world where markets have not worked. I greatly admire his commitment in that area.