| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
« January 2005 | Main | March 2005 »
It's over the top, I agree, but the paper explained its decisions to readers, according to Romenesko, this way: "Today's original Boondocks strip presents inaccurate information as fact."
Maybe someone should tell the Trib about those horoscopes it runs, not to mention at least some of the advertising...
So it spreads. California's show-biz governor is mimicking the Bush adminisration's misuse of taxpayers' funds to pay for propaganda.LA Times (reg req): "News" Video Extols Gov.'s Plan. Using taxpayer money, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration has sent television stations statewide a mock news story extolling a proposal that would benefit political boosters in the business community by ending mandatory lunch breaks for many hourly workers. The tape looks like a news report and is narrated by a former television reporter who now works for the state. But unlike an actual news report, it does not provide views critical of the proposed changes. Democrats have denounced it as propaganda. Snippets aired on as many as 18 stations earlier this month, the administration said.
There are any number of villains in this story. But I want to single out the TV stations that are playing this garbage and pretending it's news. They are party to deception, and they aid the crowd that wants to debunk all journalism as part of a campaign to turn news into whatever the people in power say it is.
I'm a passionate partisan for citizen journalism. But it is not, anytime soon, going to be a replacement for the valuable work done by the pros -- and the more people like Bush and Schwarzenegger and their allies try to devalue honorable journalism, the more they're devaluing democracy itself.
Jay Rosen: In the Press Room of the White House that is Post Press. Creating "Jeff Gannon" as a credible White House correspondent, and creating radical doubt about the intentions of mainstream journalists (in order to de-certify the traditional press) are two parts of the same effort, which stretches beyond the Bush team itself to allies in Republican Party politics, and new actors like Sinclair Broadcasting, or FreeRepublic.com, or Hugh Hewitt, or these guys. It is this larger picture that accounts for a professional tribe of journalists who, as Lemann said, "collectively felt both more harshly attacked and less important" in 2004. The more harshly attacked part comes from the Culture War rumbling below, while the message "you're unimportant" is sent directly from the top.
The tributes are pouring in for Jef Raskin, a genuine visionary who died last week.
Rest in peace.
A group that wants to assist free speech in authoritarian nations is looking for a technically savvy person -- a CTO or lead engineer type -- who can do a short term study, possibly leading to a longer-term job. This is a paying gig for the right person.
The project is intended, in its intitial form, to make possible blogging that is impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to trace. One of the people involved calls it an "anonymous, anti-tyranny blogging service."
If you're interested, please send e-mail to Jim Hake at jim@spiritofamerica.net --
Note to other bloggers: Please post your own notice about this. It's a good cause.
NOTE: If you tried sending Jim mail earlier today and it bounced, that's because the address was listed incorrectly for a while. Please try again.
Salon: See no Gannon, hear no Gannon, speak no Gannon. "It's stunning to me that there are questions about the independent press being undermined and the mainstream press doesn't seem that interested in it," says Joe Lockhart, who served as press secretary during President Clinton's second term. "People in the mainstream press have shrugged their shoulders and said, 'It's a whole lot of nothing.'"
David Lazarus (SF Chronicle): Shifting Sands in Data Leak. ChoicePoint holds an estimated 19 billion public records pertaining to virtually every adult in the country, although not one of us has authorized the company to profit from our personal info. ChoicePoint is duped into releasing reams of confidential data to identity thieves. And as far as the company is concerned, this is a crime against ChoicePoint but merely an inconvenience for all those whose privacy was violated.
UPDATED
I had lunch yesterday with several Google folks including Marissa Mayer, the company's director of consumer Web products, to discuss the new Google Toolbar, which is now in beta.
Like several other people, I have raised serious questions about this product's new "AutoLink" tool. It strikes me as an intrusion into people's browsers by a company that commands great market share.
She listened to my concerns. And she explained Google's stance -- nothing new there, and it amounts to "this is all for the users' benefit" defense. I am not convinced, however, that Google will end up doing the right thing in the end.
As Search Engine Watch asks in this piece: "Why are publishers upset? Can they block the feature that adds links to their web pages? Who rules over content, users or publishers?"
Good and fair questions -- but Google hasn't sufficiently answered them.
At the very least, Google needs to make some changes in the installation process. As users install the toolbar they should be asked if they want features that change content on web pages. There should be an opt-in process, not an opt-out process, for such things.
I have trouble with Search Engine Watch's Danny Sullivan's view that publishers of Web sites should be able to opt out of the toolbar changes. In theory, once I have content on my desktop it should be my right to "remix" it in the way I choose.
What Google isn't taking into account is that its market power, and the tendency of users to accept the default -- to eat what's on the plate someone puts in front of them -- will tend to create Google's version of the Web, not the users' version. We all hates Microsoft's Smart Tags idea because it gave more, unearned power to Microsoft. Google doesn't have that same dominance, but it has enough to worry about.
Will Google do the right thing? This is a big test.
(By the way, Mayer said that while Microsoft's former Smart Tags guy is working for Google now, he's not involved in the Toolbar project.)
Evan Williams gave me a demonstration yesterday of Odeo, an intriguing new application for creating audio content for the Web and mobile devices. It's going to help make podcasting more successful, because it'll make it easier to create them.
This well-reported piece shows the danger of hidden interests in journalism. The game played by the pro-Thune blogging campaign should have been known before the election, not after, because it might well have changed the outcome had voters known what this crowd was doing.Personal Democracy Forum: Daschle, Thune and the Blog-Storming of South Dakota. The blogging efforts on behalf of Thune's Senate campaign didn't cause greater civic participation or bring in piles of small donations. Instead nine bloggers -- two of whom were paid $35,000 by Thune's campaign -- formed an alliance that constantly attacked the election coverage of South Dakota's principal newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. More specifically, their postings were not primarily aimed at dissuading the general public from trusting the Argus' coverage. Rather, the work of these bloggers was focused on getting into the heads of the three journalists at the Argus who were primarily responsible for covering the Daschle/Thune race: chief political reporter David Kranz, state editor Patrick Lalley, and executive editor Randell Beck.
I'm at the TED gathering, where at the moment Kevin Kelly is saying that he's not entirely sure what technology is.
One definition: Anything that doesn't quite work yet...
I'm not going to blog much, but will note especially interesting stuff.
In the Web pages of Editor & Publisher, the trade journal for the newspaper industry, Steve Outing explains reality to a mostly hidebound business. Good advice.
...please let me know right away. We the Media is about to go into a new printing, and my publisher needs a final update on the mistakes so we can fix them.
The best way to let me know is e-mail, at grassroots@gillmor.com. Thanks!
Tom Foremski, formerly of the Financial Times, now runs Silicon Valley Watcher, which is just what it sounds like. He's just announced his first sponsor, and the announcement comes in the form of an advertorial full of praise for the sponsor.
I have a lot of respect for Foremski and what he's trying to do. The posting in question, however, raises the following issue:
Suppose your daily newspaper lined up a new advertiser who agreed to buy a full page ad each day. Then suppose the paper put a story on Page One to announce the advertiser's new presence and praised the advertiser's company.
Now, I'm not telling you that some newspapers don't bend over in sleazy ways for big advertisers. (Columbia Journalism Review is constantly tossing its famous (inside the industry) Darts at such behavior.) But I can't imagine a newspaper doing what I hypothetically suggested above. It would be over the top.
The Silicon Valley Watcher posting is advertising, and should be explicitly labeled that way.
(Noted via Tom Murphy)
Ed Cone has written a terrific Beginner's Guide to the Blogosphere, and I say that despite the fact that he so kindly mentioned my work...
I buy a new car every 12 years or so, and just picked up my latest one today. On the way home I realized something.
This thing isn't as much a car as a computer system on wheels. Yike.
This is not just a blow to the CIA. It's yet another blow to America's image in the world, and to our national honor.Newsweek: Aboard Air CIA. The evidence backing up Masri's account of being "snatched" by American operatives is only the latest blow to the CIA in the ongoing detention-abuse scandal. Together with previously disclosed flight plans of a smaller Gulfstream V jet, the Boeing 737's travels are further evidence that a global "ghost" prison system, where terror suspects are secretly interrogated, is being operated by the CIA. Several of the Gulfstream flights allegedly correlate with other "renditions," the controversial practice of secretly spiriting suspects to other countries without due process. "The more evidence that comes out, the clearer it is that there's been a stunning failure of accountability," says lawyer John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.
To ship suspects off to foreign countries, where they can be tortured or otherwise "interrogated" in ways that would be flagrantly illegal here, is to spit on our commitment to human rights. It turns us, by proxy, into what we profess to abhor. It shames us, or it should.
Jonathan Weber, a very savvy journalist, has assembled a team to launch New West Network, an operation that looks to span several media formats and incorporate citizen journalism to boot. It's a brave experiment and I'm rooting for them.
He was the true gonzo journalist, and now Hunter Thompson is dead, by suicide.
Today's New York Times has a story entitled "Federal Effort to Head Off TV Piracy Is Challenged" -- a headline that gives the entire weight of the dispute to one side. The story describes efforts by several organizations to challenge the Federal Communications Commission's mandate, on behalf of the copyright cartel in the entertainment industry, to lock down digitally broadcast signals so they can't be copied.
The story itself isn't bad. As the reporter discusses (though not in much depth), there are many good reasons why this anti-copying system, called the "Broadcast Flag," is a travesty -- including its attack on fair use, for scholarship and creating new art, not to mention the peculiar notion that technology companies now need permission to innovate.
But the headline is poison. By defining the debate in terms of preventing piracy -- when the story could have as easily, and accurately, been headlined as "Hollywood Move to Block Technological Innovation is Challenged" -- it sets a tone that even a fair article has trouble balancing back to an honest discussion.
This is a small issue, in a sense. The Times is not going to admit the headline is biased. There will be no correction, no clarification.
Headline writers have other duties. They tend to be overworked and underpaid, given the power their wield. And while I'm sure the headline writer in this case had no qualms -- thinking he or she was capturing the flavor of the issue -- this is a small but telling example of how a headline can twist readers' views, even before they know what the story is about.
One thing we can be almost certain about, however: We'll be extremely unlikely to see any of the major television news outlets even mention this issue, for obvious reasons that they are members of the cartel pushing the Broadcast Flag. So give the Times its due, just for covering it in the first place.
A week ago today I got a call on my mobile phone, which has a Called ID feature that lets me see the phone numbers of callers whose numbers aren't blocked from display. This time, the number was 11111111111 -- which needless to say doesn't go anywhere if you try to call it back.
The caller was a journalist from the New York Times. That's how I learned that the newspaper has rigged its phone system for outgoing calls to display 1111111111 to Caller ID systems.
Increasingly, people are refusing to accept calls from people who block the display of their numbers. I'm one of the people who blocks my outgoing number -- to avoid giving it to businesses that might put me on junk-call lists -- and I have to manually unblock the number or say my name out loud, and then have it relayed to the party I'm calling, when I encounter someone who won't take the blocked call. This seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me. People on both ends of the line have privacy concerns.
For whatever reason, the Times skirts the rule by displaying a phony number. The call goes through, even to people who don't accept calls from blocked numbers.
I can understand the Times' motive. But it strikes me as a little weird for such a big and important institution to hide behind a bogus number this way.
TheoDP writes:
While Google pooh-poohed any comparison of its controversial AutoLink feature to Microsoft's SmartTag technology, Google's generation of dynamic links to maps and use of ISBN numbers to trigger links to booksellers cover the same territory as Microsoft's 2000 patent application for Providing electronic commerce actions based on semantically labeled strings, whose sole inventor - Jeff Reynar - was the lead SmartTag Program Manager while at MS and is reportedly now a Google Product Manager who's being credited as AutoLink's creator. Reynar's patent applications that have been assigned to Microsoft, including one for Smart Links and Tags, describe a world of 'recognizer' plug-ins that automatically look at every document a user creates, receives or views, transmitting messages to 'action' plug-ins - and even to the plug-ins' authors - that can be used to decide what info you'll be presented with, what options you'll be given, what price you'll pay for goods, and even who you'll be permitted to buy from.
In his column today, Dan Okrent, the New York Times' Public Editor (read: ombudsman), offers some valuable ideas on how the newspaper can use the Web better to have a conversation with the readers, especially readers who feel aggrieved for one reason or another about the coverage. He writes, among other things:
The better use of the Web site could also give readers the chance to see letters from The Times. One of the great frustrations of my job is seeing the thoughtful letters that go out from Times reporters to readers who have taken issue with something they've written. Why frustration? Because one reader gets the benefit of the thoughtfulness (and, sometimes, the writer's candid acknowledgment that he or she might have done something better), and a couple of million others who might appreciate it do not.The caveat in the second paragraph -- "wary of posting for the millions" -- is inadvertently revealing. It assumes that a letter from a Times reporter to an individual reader is likely to remain a communication only between the two of them.There are many at The Times who really dislike some of these ideas. Al Siegal understandably worries that the paper's authority, the staff's morale and the honest pursuit of truth could be severely undermined by deceitful or disingenuous attacks on specific articles by interested parties. And some reporters are very wary of posting for the millions their own letters to individual readers, fearing they would soon be forced (by editors, by competitive reporters, by me) into an endless public confessional.
I wouldn't count on that, Times-folk. In fact, I'd count on something else: that the recipient of the letter might feel entirely free to post it online for those millions.
When I was a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, I implictly assumed that every e-mail I sent to a reader might someday be published somewhere else. No doubt I said some things very occasionally (especially with trollish folks who just wanted to bait me) that might make me cringe later on, but in general I always knew that what I said might reflect in some way on my employer, not just me -- even though a quick e-mail response was extremely different from my carefully written and edited columns.
Times reporters have an added burden. They represent the newspaper of record for the top tier of U.S. society. What they say, in the paper or otherwise, has weight beyond their individual authority. If they and their editors have to exercise the same amount of journalistic due diligence in having a conversation with readers that they do in publishing the newspaper, the conversation will never even begin.
An online discussion in which Times people were responding directly to readers would have to be understood -- by readers and everyone else -- as something quite different from what ends up in the newspaper. But would the top editors, much less the lawyers, let it happen? They should, and in the end they'll have to.
How could the Times begin to move into this conversational world? For starters, it might emulate what one forward-looking newspaper has done. The Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record publishes letters to the editor in blog format, with comments enabled under them. It's a smart experiment.
Read about it here.
PaidContent's Staci Kramer interviews the New York Times' Martin Nisenholtz about its purchase of About.com, which by one way of thinking is the world's largest blogging company. I think the Times overpaid, but the deal still makes a lot of sense in other ways.
Jerry Brown, mayor of Oakland, former California governor and former presidential candidate, is running for state attorney general. He has a blog. (It's in a frame off his home page; bad design, in my opinion.) His first posting, about a city curfew policy, is also a letter to the editor in today's San Francisco Chronicle.
Several years ago, Microsoft was pounded -- correctly -- for the "Smart Tags" feature it was slipping onto people's PCs. This essentially created hyperlinks where none had existed before, and sent people clicking on those links to Microsoft-chosen content. It was insidious, and a number of folks, with Walt Mossberg in the lead, denounced the move so loudly that the company was basically forced to back away. (Of course, Microsoft being Microsoft, the company slipped it back into Office in the 2003 version, one more reason I didn't "upgrade" on my Windows PC.)
Now Google, using its own growing clout, is doing something similar with its latest "Google Toolbar" for Internet Explorer on PCs, says Search Engine Watch. No, Google doesn't control the operating system, and if I understand this correctly the feature isn't turned on by default (please correct me if this is not the case). Moreover, it only works with certain kinds of terms, and you have to explictly download the toolbar in the first place. And, of course, no one has to use this -- one more reason to choose Firefox as your browser, anyway.
All of those caveats aside, it's still a bad idea, and an unfortunate move by a company that is looking to continue its hypergrowth. With its enormous market share in search, Google is starting to act in ways that are reminiscent of our favorite monopolist. As Dave Winer observes, this is near enough to changing Web content as to be worrisome.
SF Chronicle: Bay Area home prices increase 20%, sales skyrocket. The unrelenting Bay Area real estate market kicked off 2005 in high gear, as home prices in January soared 20 percent from a year ago and sales reached the highest level for the month since 1989.
Followed a link from Robert Scoble to a "DemoGod" award winner at this year's Demo conference. A firm that calls itself "your website company" might consider that at least a few folks not in Microsoft's orbit will find that slogan amusing.
An odious outfit called ChoicePoint compiles electronic dossiers of financial and other personal data about Americans and sells the information to governments and businesses. Thanks to a California law requiring notification to people whose financial privacy may have been compromised, the company has fessed up to a grotesque privacy mess: selling the information to phony companies pretending to be legitimate businesses, as MSNBC first reported. This is undoubtedly the tip of an ugly iceberg.
The Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow, aided by a grant from the Center for Investigative Reporting, has published a brilliant multimedia Web project and book about the private data-mongers like ChoicePoint and their growing ties to government snooping machines. It's dismal stuff, and getting worse all the time.
UPDATE: In a story today, O'Harrow quotes a ChoicePoint executive this way: "ChoicePoint spokesman James Lee said the company learned for the first time yesterday the case involved people in states outside California."Where's Congress in all this? Hiding, as usual, as the privacy of all Americans gets more and more illusory.Yeah, right.
Jeff Jarvis is doing his usual good job of discussing the latest censorship moves in Washington. As he says correctly, in a posting that lists the three dozen or so members who were brave enough to fight for the First Amendment, this indecency legislation is itself indecent.
UPDATED
Mainstream journalists are congenitally thin-skinned; insecurity seems almost a precondition to employment in a big-city newsroom. This has always been a notable irony, given that the journalism business routinely shoots people off their pedestals (often after putting them there in the first place).
One of the healthier aspects of the rise of bloggers as media watchdogs has been the way journalists have had to start developing thicker skins -- not ignoring their critics but also not reacting with the pure defensiveness of the past. Professionals are still sensitive about all this, but at least a few have started listening.
Lately, some bloggers have been showing a certain sensitivity of their own. In several cases folks have responded with fury to what they perceive as the mainstream media's wrong-headed condescension toward the online world, even when the articles in question have struck me, at any rate, more as mild criticism (though with hyperbole thrown into the mix) than outright attacks.
Are media organizations saying occasionally absurd things about bloggers? Of course. But this is not the same thing as a collective mainstream media counter-attack. Sloppy journalism can seem that way, but it usually isn't. Some of the lame Big Media coverage surely falls under the Occam's Razor umbrella -- the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. (Or, as someone once said more pungently, "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.")
I'll save my fury for the things that matter more to me, such as the continuing, even accelerating consolidation of the telecommunications industry. You want a threat to online speech? Try having just two broadband providers in any given community, and allow them to control what flows on the data pipes they control. Or how about the headlong rush toward federal censorship by Congress, the Bush administration and their bureaucratic functionaries in the Federal Communications Commission? Now those are truly scary trends.
Afterwords: Read the comments for smart responses including Dave's (I linked to his postings). And he points out Peggy Noonan's lover letter to the blogosphere, which is a good piece indeed.
I wish Michael Robertson well with his new MP3tunes operation, largely because it's the right thing to sell music in a customer-friendly way. But I hope the site will expand the collection a bit, at least in the classical category. My search on "Mozart" came up empty.
Denseness in the copyright sphere is too common a phenomenon, but it's bizarre and not a little scary when the offender is a newspaper. After all, newspapers rely in part on the notion of "fair use" -- using short quotes from others' work -- to create their daily report.
Now we have the Tulsa World, an Oklahoma paper, launching legal threats against a blogger who's been quoting from and linking to its stories. It's demanding that the site take down "any articles and/or editorials (in whole or in part)" as well as unauthorized links.
If the blog has been republishing stories in full or using substantial portions of them, that's a no-no. But short quotes plainly fall under fair use -- and links, for heaven's sake, are just links to publicly available Web content.
Earth to Tulsa World: Stop being so arrogant, and get a clue. Sheesh.
I'm on my way back to California after three days in North Carolina, where I participated in several blogging conversations, visited a class at the University of North Carolina, gave a talk, met some terrific folks, ate some great food and learned a lot. Many thanks to all of my hosts, including Anton Zuiker, John Robinson, Ed Cone and Paul Jones (among others). See you all again soon, I hope.
Shooter.net: Attack of the SF Muni Fare Inspectors. The Fare Inspectors tried to prevent me from taking photos under threat of citation. When I refused to stop, they tried to cite me but couldn’t find any relevant code, regulation or law to cite me. Enlisting the aid of the SFPD and BART Police officers also yielded now results. No citation was issued.
A journalist called me up today to talk about the Eason Jordan situation, which culminated in Jordan's resignation from CNN on Friday. I've not commented on it mainly because I still don't know what the man actually said at the now-notorious World Economic Forum panel.
Whatever it was, it was apparently a horrendous gaffe. If, as reported, he claimed U.S. forces were deliberately killing reporters in Iraq, that's an outrageous statement, unless there's evidence. But it's also widely reported that he backed off from his remark.
There's no doubt about one thing: The bloggers who pounded on Jordan and his now-former employer, CNN, helped make the story a story long before most of the major media picked it up -- and most of them picked it up only to cover his resignation.
Was it a story? Of course. A senior news executive for a global news presence makes news when he makes a statement that, if true, is important information. Braggadocio in public forums is not a great quality for such people, and misstatements about matters so potentially explosive are career-threatening mistakes.
Like Jeff Jarvis and others who've commented to enormous length on this situation, I agree that a very quick and public retraction and apology would probably have saved his job. Too late now -- and like many I now also suspect that whatever is on that video recording may be worse than we've been led to believe.
If I understand this correctly, the aristocrats and functionaries who run the World Economic Forum control the video and refuse to let it loose. They are making a bad situation worse.
The very notion that a roomful of well-connected people could or would keep anything like this "off the record" is ludicrous. Non-journalists don't know what this notion means, or don't care. Let's just do away with it altogether.
CNN's response to the affair deserves some attention. In contrast to the CBS debacle last fall, CNN does seem to have attempted to make its case with bloggers (before the Big Media caught on that anything was happening) fairly early.
The chest-pounding in the blog world over this and other recent events is not the most attractive side of the blogosphere. Nobody likes the kid who brags all day in school.
But this is about something more serious than tone. Bloggers and other citizen journalists are doing increasingly valuable work.
This is a time when professionals and citizen journalists should be finding common ground, or at least listening to each other with growing respect. Instead, I fear, the gulf is growing.
As noted here before, the News & Record, the newspaper of record in Greensboro, North Carolina, is embarking on one of mainstream journalism's most important experiments: turning the paper into a community forum, "to build a Web presence that invites readers in to share the news they know and engage in the civic discussion," as John Robinson, the paper's editor wrote on his blog. (See online editor Lex Alexander's memo, chock-full of ideas, for more.)
After a visit today with Robinson and some staff members, plus several people from the thriving Greensboro blogging community, I'm more persuaded than ever that this is an experiment to watch -- carefully.
These folks don't claim to have all the answers. They are doing the smart thing: asking the right questions, and listening hard to what they hear. Yet I suspect I learned more from them than vice versa, because this is the first group of newspaper folks I've met who are grappling so directly with the issues.
Go, Greensboro. This is going to be complicated, but fun.
More than 130 people have signed up for today's Triangle Bloggers Conference at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I'll be leading one of the sessions with Paul Jones, who runs the ibiblio.org project, a massive digital library.
Last night's dinner included one of the people I admire most in the journalism field, Phil Meyer. A professor here, he recently published an important book, The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age. If you care about the future of a craft that makes a difference -- or should -- in our society, pick up a copy.
Tomorrow I'll pay a call on the News & Record, a newspaper in nearby Greensboro. The N&R, you may recall, is doing some serious citizen journalism, and I'm looking forward to learning more.
And on Monday, I'll visit one of Paul's classes before giving a public lecture on the usual topic.
Just signed on as a speaker at David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect conference in Washington late next month. In a section on freedom, I'm going to discuss freedom of the press, with specific reference to the promise of -- and challenges to -- grassroots journalism.
Jimmy Wales, founder of the important Wikipedia project, has been in the San Francisco Bay Area the past couple of days. Looks like he's gotten Google to help out with bandwidth and hosting for Wikipedia, which deserves such support.
At a dinner last night he was circumspect about the Google deal, but was his usual thoughtful self on a variety of other topics. I am increasingly impressed by his depth and vision.
Wikipedia and its latest offshoot, Wikinews, are getting more and more press. (The NY Times ran a story on Wikinews yesterday.) I'm skeptical of Wikinews in some ways, but am watching it carefully to learn from it. In fact, I hope we'll be able to collaborate on citizen journalism in some way.
The almost hysterical anti-Wikipedia comments I see from some folks (see the quote about "stunning" naivete in the NYT piece, for example) doesn't mean the critics are entirely wrong. But they are missing the point in so many ways.
One critic is a Big University professor -- a former professional journalist with significant online experience -- whose class I visited recently as a guest lecturer. I was talking about Wikipedia, and he launched into a rant about its failings. In particular, he complained about the several inaccuracies in an article about a topic with which he was deeply familiar.
"So," I asked, "did you fix them?"
"No," he responded, "I don't have time for that kind of thing."
Talk about not getting it. No, we can't make Wikipedia perfect. But we can improve it, which is the point.
So now the Hewlett-Packard board is back to square one. The talk has resumed about spinning off the printer business. This isn't such a bad idea. An industry wag suggested a scenario to me after HP bought Compaq:
1) HP sells the printer business to Agilent, itself a spinoff of the old HP.
2) HP, hanging onto the computer business, renames itself Compaq.
3) Agilent, which has now reassembled the businesses that comprised the heart -- and soul -- of the old HP, renames itself Hewlett-Packard.
Makes sense to me, anyway.
When I got up this morning and heard the news that Hewlett-Packard had fired Carly Fiorina as CEO, my immediate reaction was to imagine the column I'd be writing about the move. Then I remembered: I don't do that anymore.
But I can't resist noting that, once again, corporate America's movers and shakers are rewarding failure, this time to the tune of a $21 million "severance package." It's how things work for CEOs: Succeed and you get millions. Fail and you get millions.
What a scam. HP's shareholders should be outraged, but like good sheep they'll just let it go.
The "Jeff Gannon" saga took an ugly turn. Gannon, you may recall, was the White House "reporter" of questionable bona fides -- apparently a Republican operative whose main role was to ask friendly questions of the president and his spokespeople, a countervailing force to what the Bush administration plainly believes is an overwhelmingly liberal White House press corps. (That view of the suck-up brigade is laughable, in my view, given the half-baked, credulous coverage the administration has enjoyed.)
Various bloggers have been investigating Gannon, and one of them turned up some news that led him to silence himself.
Timothy Karr has some details. See also Daniel Conover's analysis, in which he notes: "It must be clear now that blogs and websites are providing the bulk of significant real-time reporting on MSM matters. Those of us who work in the MSM and care about these issues turn to these "non-official" sources to get the scoop on our industry, and I don't expect that to change any time soon."
Fair enough. But this episode should give people a queasy feeling. The scandal is the administration's contempt for the public, and the lack of journalistic credibility this person demonstrated, not whatever he was doing on the side.
Slate is featuring a detailed story on how airlines' Internet check-in (printing a boarding pass before leaving for the airport) is a blatant loophole in security.
Bruce Schneier, a security expert and writer of note, noted this 18 months ago. Still, true, though.
An object lesson in how not to do a corporate blog: This lame site was created by McDonald's as part of an advertising campaign. It's patronizing, phony and downright counterproductive to the message.
PR pro Kevin Dugan tears it apart in a posting, and he's right. Sheesh.
Lisa Williams has done a smart, 4-minute video explainer about podcasting.
Now, if we could only give the genre a more accurate name. It's about sending MP3s to devices of various kinds, not solely the iPod. Watch Williams' piece anyway.
Howard Owens is director of new media for the Ventura County Star, a newspaper in southern California. (I'm fond of the paper in part because it used to run my column.) Owens has a personal blog of real substance, and is becoming a champion of the best ideas in grassroots journalism.
In a recent posting to a mailing list, he said the paper's online editor has the new, additional role of promoting citizen journalism in the community. He wrote:
We see blogs, forums, photo blogs and other forms of citizen journalism as a significant part of the online news world. Our readers want to be part of the process of sharing the news and shaping the news.
(To see his posting in full, go to this link, type "Owens" -- without the quotes -- into the Search box, click on Search and then select the item entitled "Citizen Journalism (Owens, Howard) [2005/02/03]" and click on the View Message button.)
His paper's decision is heartening. It's a move by a relatively small daily (90,000 circulation) owned by a medium-sized chain (Scripps Howard) to embrace the future.
I can't wait to see what the result will be.
Bob Herbert (NY Times): Stories From the Inside. The Bush administration has turned Guantánamo into a place that is devoid of due process and the rule of law. It's a place where human beings can be imprisoned for life without being charged or tried, without ever seeing a lawyer, and without having their cases reviewed by a court. Congress and the courts should be uprooting this evil practice, but freedom and justice in the United States are on a post-9/11 downhill slide.
As you surmise, I'm not a fan of pro football. But last year I went to a great party at chez Templeton, where the idea was to TiVo the game, speed through the football and watch the expensively produced commercials. Much better way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
You can't make up stuff as sick as the record labels' latest PR stunt: suing the dead. As the Register notes: "Death is no obstacle to feeling the long arm of the Recording Industry Ass. of America. Lawyers representing several record companies have filed suit against an 83 year-old woman who died in December, claiming that she made more than 700 songs available on the internet."
Maybe these "mistakes" aren't mistakes at all. Maybe they're designed to get publicity, to make sure that we all get the message that the music companies are willing to be totally unscrupulous -- and not at all careful about aiming their lawsuits at actual infringers -- in their zeal to stop any unauthorized use of their material.
Could they be that sleazy? Hard to believe, but then suing dead people is pretty far-fetched in a normal universe.
He's signed a deal to put between covers what he's been doing so brilliantly on his PressThink blog. Congrats, Jay.
In an appropriately scathing posting on his Wi-Fi blog, Glenn Fleishman goes after think tanks and lobbying organizations that seem, in at least some cases, to be what he calls "sock puppets" for the telecommunications-industry giants that want to stop municipally built data systems before they start.
The lack of transparency in the world of opinion-making is an ongoing scandal. What we have today is a system of opinion laundering, where powerful interests try to create public support for their side of issues without disclosing the hidden agendas. Media organizations then publish or broadcast credulous reports that may be grossly biased, without even hinting to news audiences what's going on.
We need far, far more transparency than we get the opinion-making business -- and don't kid yourself, it's big business. What we have, instead, are increasingly more sophisticated efforts to hide the laundering.
All of this is one reason why I recommend that you stop by Source Watch, formerly called Disinfopedia. It's a "a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests." (See, for example, the site's "How to Research Front Groups" explainer.)
I gave a talk last week to the Knight Ridder editorial page editors, who assemble periodically to have a "whither the editorial pages" confab. My role was provocateur. First, I gave them my standard schtick on how journalism is shifting from the lecture mode to something between a conversation and a seminar. Then I got to the recommendations, which went roughly this way:Newspapers, with few exceptions, are strangely oblivious to the huge opportunity in citizen journalism. More than almost any other entities, they could be taking advantage of their innate advantages. Yet they are not.
Yes, newspapers have been losing circulation and power, but they retain a surprisingly deep reservoir of credibility and authority in their communities. The reservoir must be replenished, and it is the citizens who -- given the opportunity -- will be able, and perhaps glad, to help.
The key is in having the conversation with the community and, even more, helping community members have a conversation among themselves. Newspapers, given their positions, can be at the center of this conversation -- not the object of it in most cases, but the enabler and, to some extent, agenda-setter. (The Greensboro (North Carolina) News & Record is a leader in this arena already, and has plans to move much farther.)
What is the one place in most newspapers where the conversation has already begun? The editorial page, of course. Think about it. What are letters to the editor if not a stab at a conversation? They're not very effective, because a) they are rarely as timely as they might be even in an age of faxes and e-mail; b) the conversation isn't threaded so people can refer instantly to what inspired the letter; and c) most newspapers get more letters than they can possibly print, especially on topics that generate the most passion.
Editorial pages should take that thumbnail of a conversation and blow it up into the real thing. The way they can do it is, over time, to invert the basic function of the editorial pages.
In other words, turn the printed page into a guide to and "greatest hits" from the community conversation.
The bulk of the debates and discussions will take place online and, crucially, also in public forums where newspaper people serve as moderators but not lecturers. Help frame the debate, not force it. Then use the print pages to reflect and amplify the conversation.
There are plenty of specific ways to approach something like this. Some require more resources than others. I'd suggest, for starters:
Many editorial pages at smaller newspapers couldn't afford this, in staff time or financially. But no editorial page is too resource-hungry to be unable to start a blog (some are already doing it). Small beginnings can lead to great things.
Small or large, newspapers can ask for help from the community. This should be a collaborative endeavor. There are people in the community who will be happy -- honored -- to serve as moderators, to help police the site and keep it a place where people respect each other's views and ideas.
If editorial pages do something like this, they'll restore some of the luster they've lost over the past few decades (edit pages aren't exactly the most exciting places in most papers). And they'll show the rest of the newspaper how it can be done. The conversation should include the entire paper, not just the edit page, after all.
I truly believe that this is a golden opportunity for newspapers. Whether they'll seize it is another issue.
Chris Anderson, back from his around-the-world jaunt, notes my End of Objectivity piece and adds his take, including this:
Today in the US the newspaper is fading, as is its influence on American journalism: news and information is becoming a commodity. What will rise as a differentiating competitive advantage? I'd argue that it's not so much pure opinion and political partisanship (although that's been the case on radio) as it is sensibility and worldview.Note: I'll be updating the end-of-objectivity piece soon. I've gotten lots of valuable suggestions, both in the comments and privately.
I put "empire" in quotes because the notion of a blogging conglomerate seems bizarre when the barrier to entry is so low. Still, as Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis have already shown (and others are soon to jump in) there's clearly a business model forming for blog publishing companies.
Here's a collection of topical blogs in the United Kingdom, operating under the Minkmedia umbrella.
I'm watching with interest.
If you're in the neighborhood of Minnesota's Twin Cities, there's a screening and panel discussion tonight for the "Blogumentary" movie. I'm on the panel, and I gather I'm in the documentary, too.
Jay Rosen interviews Canadian reporter David Akin, who totally gets this stuff.
Jim Mitchell, a former business editor of the San Jose Mercury News, died on Monday.
Jim grasped technology's importance as a local story with international impact. Always a gentleman even when we disagreed, he helped me understand Silicon Valley and its people.
Rest in peace.
UPDATED
A few years ago, when ordered by a judge to remove Internet Explorer from the Windows operating system, Microsoft offered as one option an operating system that wouldn't work. I called this "compliance with a raised middle finger."
Now, ordered by the European Union to sell a version of Windows with Media Player removed, Microsoft proposed to name the OS "Windows XP Reduced Media Edition," another example of the company's tendency to give the finger to government whenever the mood strikes. (This latest insult-the-judge move is even more puzzling given that the EU didn't tell our favorite monopolist to sell the "reduced" version at a lower price, which means that PC makers are hardly likely to opt for a version that has less software at the same price.)
Anyway, Microsoft agreed to rename (eWeek) the non-Media Player version after the EU protested. But this leaves open the issue of what the actual name should be.
The title of this posting offers one suggestion. Here are some other possibilities, all showing due appreciation for Microsoft's rare combination of arrogance, paranoia and predatory skill.
You get the general idea. But Microsoft needs your ideas, too. Post them below.
Let's work together to assist a poor helpless giant.
UPDATE: As usual, someone has thought about this before I did. See this funny posting by Rex Hammock.
NY Times (1967): U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote. United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
UPDATED
Well, there go the pay scales at Nick Denton's company...Ad Age (reg req): Sony Pays $25,000 a Month for Gawker Blog. Sony Consumer Electronics e-Solutions Group is the exclusive sponsor for the launch of LifeHacker, a blog that goes live today about the software of personal gadgetry by Gawker Media, according to the online company. The deal, which also includes placements on Gizmodo, Gawker's earlier gadget title, will cost Sony in the range of $25,000 a month, according to a source close to the deal. The sponsorship runs for about three months.
I'm not nuts about the sole-sponsor ad model, but it's obviously going to be a wave of the future in personal journalism.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, a big-time blogger is taking a break. Andrew Sullivan announces he's going on hiatus.
Ebb, flow. Just like the real world.
(Sony item via Alan Mutter)
The Software Freedom Law Center will provide "legal representation and other law related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software." (Here are more details from today's Mercury News.)
We need something like this for grassroots journalism.
Recent Comments