Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.

Reminder: New Site and Blog

Just a reminder that I've moved my blog to Bayosphere.com, and it has a new RSS feed as well.

Moving Day...

So here we go. Bayosphere, the first project of Grassroots Media Inc., is in pre-launch territory.

I'm moving my blogging over there, to this page. (I'm already feeling nostalgic for Typepad, which has been a great blog host, but it's important that my blog be located where the larger site lives.)

Please update your bookmarks accordingly. And please come visit.

Journalistic Ethics, Codes of

Turns out there are bunches of them, as Len Witt notes. I tend to go with Jeff Jarvis' notion that the basics are pretty simple -- "Don't lie. Don't sell out." -- though the devil, as always, is in the details.

I tend to bring it down to this even tinier admonition: Be honorable. Period.

Good Morning Silicon Valley Blog

GMSV is a real blog now, I'm glad to see.

Business Model: Cause Customers Trouble, Make Them Pay to Fix

CNet: Security gripes? Microsoft feels your pain. It's not news to Microsoft that many, if not most, average Windows users have gripes about their PC experiences. In response, the software company is unveiling on Friday a new subscription-based computer fix-it service, aimed at automatically patching security holes, blocking viruses and spyware, and generally automating the chores of maintaining a computer's health.

I would have written a different beginning to this story, roughly as follows:

In winning and sustaining its monopoly in the operating system and browser markets, Microsoft has exposed countless millions of people to woes from security holes that have become conduits for viruses, worms and spyware. Now the software giant is planning to charge its captive customers to clean up the mess it created.

Drug War Still Failing

CNN: Military, law enforcement caught in FBI drug sting. FBI agents posing as cocaine traffickers nabbed 16 current and former law enforcement officers and U.S. soldiers who had accepted more than $222,000 in bribes to help move drugs past checkpoints, the government said.

Not that it will make any difference.

The War on (Some) Drugs continues anyway, even if it causes more harm than it prevents. But an alliance of interests -- law enforcement, Big Pharma, look-tough politicians and others -- continues to prevail over common sense.

Comment Spammers On Attack

I've been too busy deleting online gambling commment spams here. One word about the people who do this: scumbags.

Google's Toolbar Keeps Invasive Autolink

So Google has mostly ignored the criticism of its Autolink feature in the new Toolbar. eWeek reports some modifications from the original, but not enough.

The principles here are simple enough. The practicalities are nuanced.

I'm generally on the side of user-modifiable Web content once it's reached the user's computer. Google maintains that's all it's doing here, and that users have ample choice about whether to download the toolbar or not.

Fair enough, but not sufficient. Google commands a special position, and the Toolbar default settings -- which are what most people will use -- are going to give he search company too much influence. This is a natural move for Google, but it should re-emphasize to everyone that the company's motives are the standard ones: looking out for its own interests, period.

Site publishers have never had the absolute ability to determine what readers see. But what Google is doing here goes beyond giving users a way to, say, resize fonts or block popup ads. It's using other people's work for its own -- and its partners' -- commercial purposes in a way that alters the content.

The alterations aren't that big a deal, not today. But it's inevitable that they will grow. This is too powerful a tool not to be used in more expansive ways.

Google still offers me value. But so do the alternatives, and I'm increasingly seeking those out.

Celebrating Political Sleaze

AP: Conservatives Honor DeLay With Gala. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, facing an audience of conservative well-wishers who reject as politically motivated the ethics questions that have dogged him for months, on Thursday night fired back at Democrats by calling them members of a party with no ideas and "no class."

Prediction: Videotapes from this event will be used against some Republicans in upcoming political campaigns.

Hyperlocal and Google

As Steve Yelvington notes today, Google's acquisition of the Dodgeball service is yet another shot across the bow for local news operations. I suspect many of them have no idea why, which is worrisome. (Steve's explanation will help.)

Citizens Query Public Officials Via Website

Philly Future, a citizen journalism site, has gotten the city's chief information officer to agree to an interview, and giving the online community first crack at what questions to ask. Now let's see which ones she answers...

One More Time on Iraq War: The Fix Was In

CNN: Bush asked to explain UK war memo. Eighty-nine Democratic members of the U.S. Congress last week sent President George W. Bush a letter asking for explanation of a secret British memo that said "intelligence and facts were being fixed" to support the Iraq war in mid-2002.

This request will probably be ignored or dismissed as "old news" by the administration. But so what?

Who can possibly doubt anymore that the Bush administration decided to launch the Iraq war long, long before it made the official "decision" in 2003? This was obvious even before the war started.

So when the Democrats -- whose spines remain missing in action -- profess to be shocked, shocked by this memo, they're either liars or fools. Or both.

(Speaking of feckless, the U.S. mass media are finally waking up to this memo, almost two weeks after it appeared in the British press. About time...)

Taking Media Risks in a Dictatorship

An editor at the Guardian alerts me to This is Zimbabwe, a pro-democracy blog in a nation run by a despot. I admire the courage of the people who are doing this.

They remind us all that liberty -- including press freedom, something we take for granted in our privileged corner of the world -- is not universal. It takes bravery to obtain, and hard work to maintain.

The Media and Change

Lance Knobel delivered a brilliant lecture in Australia, and posted the text on his blog. Read "Nullius in verba: navigating through the new media democracy" and learn.

Jay Rosen, the other speaker on the program, discussed "Each Nation its Own Press" -- another terrific read.

A Reporting Tour de Force

Drunkenbatman's opus on his investigation into a software project is extraordinary. He's done apparently prodigious research, and does something more journalists should do: He tells us what he doesn't know, not just what he does.

BlogNashville, in Retrospect

Mark Glaser has a good roundup of the events at last weekend's blogging confab. Glenn Reynolds also looks back on the gathering in a TechCentralStation piece

An extra word here of praise for three of the principal organizers, Bob Cox, Bill Hobbs and Rex Hammock, and the volunteers who helped them. They did a great job.

Apple's Beta Operating System

UPDATED

I'm selling my old Mac Powerbook, and bought a new one that has Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) preinstalled. The changeover -- migrating my old applications and data to the new machine -- has been nothing but trouble. I won't go into the details, but aAfter following instructions to the letter I find myself reinstalling for the third time. Who has time for this crap?

Update: I was asked in the comments what went wrong. This: The utility that brings old apps over during the install created system problems -- such as making iChat unusable -- and the after-install migration utility simply failed to work at all. Then, after another clean OS install (and after then manually moving and/or reinstalling apps, Filevault failed when I turned it on for the first time (hung up, forcing hard reboot, damaging Home directory). Ridiculous.

Is it a customer's fault for using third-party software that may or may not be part of the problems? Let's say for the moment that it is (though that's a somewhat bizarre notion if you think about the purpose of a personal computer with an operating system that has programming hooks designed to let third parties create new applications).

If so, Apple needs to change its installation procedures and migration tools. It could tell people to reinstall all applications one by one. Or it could keep a database of software it knows to be compatible with the new OS and tell the migration utilities to refuse to touch anything else. But to provide tools that either break the system or fail to work at all is not very useful.

The Fallujah Mosque Shooting, Unedited

Kevin Sites, the American reporter who stirred up the world with his videos of the Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque last year, has posted the entire video online. He's also given NPR a long interview about it.

More on this from Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing.

A Blogging Beat at a Newspaper

I just got an email from a reporter for a Big Newspaper that's starting a blogging beat. Now that's a sea change...

Lucky Friday This Week

There's a gathering of grassroots-media types and celebration of JD Lasica's new book, Darknet, at the Varnish Gallery in San Francisco Friday evening, 6-9 p.m. Address: 77 Natoma street between 1st and 2nd St. and Mission and Howard.

Huffington Uber-Blog Launches

The Huffington Post has launched, and it's part-Drudge (though from a different perspective), part blog of blogs. It's obviously version 1.0, which means you should give it time to settle down.

The great Harry Shearer will "Eat the Press" -- this could be fun.

Overall, the site seems to be aiming at the role of op-ed page of the Net. I'm watching with great interest, and reading some of it, too.

Weird Characters on Mac

UPDATED

I snipped the above from the unmediated site to show a problem I occasionally run into when browsing on my Mac: Quotes and apostrophes (and some other punctuation marks) get garbled with odd characters.

I'm not sure what causes this, but it causes me to avoid returning to such sites.

UPDATE: From the comments -- is this the answer? (There are some terrific, detailed comments if you're into the nuts and bolts of why this happens.)

More Evidence of Housing Trouble to Come

Marketwatch: Getting in at any price. Homebuyers increasingly approach home loans much the way consumers buy cars, shopping for the lowest possible monthly payment to avoid being left out cold on the housing-boom sidewalk. But the explosion of such products, a sign of looser lending standards, suggests many consumers are taking on complex loans without fully understanding the risks they face when interest rates rise in the future, some analysts say. And that could pose a ripple effect in overheated real estate markets.

See also, from the Washington Post, "It's on the house,", an article about the dangerous trend in which "everybody is paying for everything with (borrowing on) home equity" -- and we, the taxpayers, subsidize this. The home mortgage interest tax deduction is a questionable policy to begin with, but we turn that into a subsidy of totally unrelated spending by extending the deduction to loans on equity for spending that has nothing whatever to do with home ownership.

We are less a nation of risktakers than a culture of reckless spendthrifts.

Aggregating the Critics

Now Google is collecting movie reviews...

Another Legal Threat Against Speech

A Florida newspaper is reporting legal threats against parents who've been criticizing a charter school company and its operations in this forum. The name of the company is Charter Schools USA.

I hope the parents in the community remove any actually defamatory statements, if there are any (and the parents deny that there are). According to the news story, the company wouldn't specify which postings it found objectionable.

But I hope the parents will aggressively defend their right to be critical of a school administration that cancels PTO meetings, among other acts that sound pretty arrogant from a distance. And I hope they get help in that defense from free-speech defenders in the legal community.

Here, meanwhile, is the almost certain outcome in the wider Web community. Many people will now a) link to the story and the online forum; and b) mention the name of the company. (The story was just Slashdotted, which means it's going to get huge play online.)

One result? Before long, if you type "Charter Schools USA" into your favorite search engine, that news story -- and the forum, assuming it stays online, along with some withering commentary about the company -- will be near the top of the rankings. One suspects this will be a consequence that Charter Schools USA did not foresee.

Making Books of Blogs

An Israeli company plans to take the best blog postings by customers and put them between covers, says Nir Ofir, the editor.

Kansas, U.S., Beg for Ridicule

As the New York Times reports, advocates of "intelligent design" -- a code phrase for creationism -- are pushing Kansas toward classroom teaching designed to undermine Darwin's incredibly well-supported theory of evolution.

Unsurprisingly, people testifying in favor of this idiocy -- and the Board of Education member leading the charge -- haven't fully read (KC Star) the proposal. They're apparently taking it on faith.

Meanwhile, India and China and other nations are training young people to understand science and math at levels U.S. kids don't begin to approach. As America fiddles, replacing science with religion, our future may go up in the smoke of self-inflicted ignorance. Our international competitors must be laughing at us.

We are faithless to our children when we put them at such a disadvantage.

Google's New Misstep

I'm still a fan of Google, but the company has some blind spots. On privacy, for example, Google folks say all the right things, but "Trust us" is not enough for me.

The latest uproar -- a justified one, I believe -- is over the new "Accelerator" product. As CNet reports, there are issues galore on this.

As if the privacy concerns weren't enough, there are suggestions that the tool also can cause trouble with Web-based applications.

Perhaps Google needs to think a little longer and harder before unleashing its latest ideas on the Web.

And perhaps the rest of us need to be much more cautious about giving our trust to the company. Flush your Google cookies often, folks. Or anonymize them.

It'll Be a Blend of Old and New

Craig Newmark: Newsrooms are important. With all the excitement about citizens' media, it's easy to forget how important current news operations are. We have a lot of journalists there, but also, fact checkers, editors, and so on, and they perform an indispensable function.

Blogging for Human Rights

The excellent organization called Human Rights Watch is asking bloggers to help "prevent discrimination, uphold political freedom, protect people from inhumane treatment in wartime, and campaign to bring offenders to justice."

I trust this will annoy the pro-torture community.

Bonus: Human Rights Watch RSS feeds.

HP Gets a Clue

UPDATED

Thomas Hawk posted a civil but negative comment on a Hewlett-Packard blog. HP deleted it. Hawk raised hell, and got noticed. David Gee, the HP blog host, reversed his decision.

In an e-mail this morning, Hawk said:

I think all in all HP did the right thing. Everyone deserves second chances and I’m optimistic that we will see more responsible corporate blogging from HP going forward.

Companies should think carefully about using comments on their blogs though. Unlike an individual blogger, corporate bloggers have additional constituencies to think about -- namely shareholders and company employees.

I always thought that when you were with the Merc that you did a pretty good job managing comments. Certainly comments do need to be moderated and there are things that need to be censored (spam, racist and offensive language, vulgarity, etc.). But smart companies should realize that simply deleting critical comments is not smart business. You might get away with it sometimes but there is a chance that you won’t -- and if you don’t, the fallout can be much worse. Credibility is a really important thing.

This example also points out two other things.

1. The blogosphere has put tremendous power through the collective into the hands of even the smallest bloggers. You are already keenly aware of this. The ability to get something printed at Slashdot and the ensuing traffic is something that is new and it is real power that smart bloggers and consumers now have. And whether it is Engadget or Gizmodo or Slashdot or Boing Boing or Instapundit or Dan Gillmor, the big blogs really are pretty accessible in a lot of ways to little guys who know how to pitch things right.

The tech blogging community also is pretty tight and pretty fast. Although I think Mark Cuban disagreed with me on my post, within an hour of my posting it and emailing Mark he responded back with his own thoughts through personal email. Robert Scoble put a link up on the story this evening.

2. It shows that corporations still need a lot of work in developing best practices blogging standards. There are already companies like Cymfony (who I suspect was an unnamed company that I once called out in a comment on your blog) that claim to help corporations best deal with the blogosphere. Hopefully these companies do so in a truly constructive and positive way. Open dialog, respectful conversation and transparency will best benefit even the largest of corporations in the end. Robert Scoble has shown this at Microsoft and other companies would be wise to figure out blogging and how best to use it constructively.

Update and corrected: As noted in comments, David Gee says someone else deleted the post and he put it back up.

Blog Nashville

The non-conference conference has begun. I'm leading a session on citizens media this morning.

If you're here, Rebecca MacKinnon's session on Global Voices didn't make it into the program. It's at 10:30 in West Lobby 50. (Competes with my session; oh, well...)

Password for Latte? Oh, Sure

VeriSign claims it persuaded "85% of survey participants" to compromise their computer passwords for a $3 Starbucks cash card, according to this story in Information Week.

Among the questions I wish the reporter had asked:

Did VeriSign verify that these logons and passwords actually worked? Or did most of these people just give out a phony password?

I've put in a call to VeriSign PR and will let you know what they say.

A Win for Fair Use, Consumer Rights

CNet: Court says FCC's 'broadcast flag' is toast. In a stunning victory for television buffs and hardware makers, a federal appeals court has tossed out government rules that would have outlawed many digital TV receivers and tuner cards starting July 1.

Now the entertainment cartel will have to get its wishes the old-fashioned way. It will have to attempt to verbally bludgeon or buy enough members of Congress to get an actual law passed, as opposed to the end run it pulled with its friends at the Federal Communications Commission, which enacted a rule giving the cartel what it wanted.

The broadcast flag rule was an amazingly brazen piece of work. It would force manufacturers of anything that could be used to receive or display a digital broadcast video signal to refuse to redistribute the video. In other words, you could watch the show but, if the copyright holder wished, you could not record it on your VCR or send it to another TV set.

The idea was to prevent unauthorized distribution, obviously, and it's easy to understand why the cartel worries about this. But the broadcast flag sent a message both to customers and innovative technologists: We are in a pay-per-view world of hyper-controlled media, if the copyright decrees it, and you may not do anything to save your fair use or other traditional rights unless we approve.

Librarians and others concerned with restoring some balance in copyright sued to block the FCC's rule, and the court has agreed (here's a PDF of the ruling; 116k). From the ruling:

The FCC argues that the Commission has “discretion” to
exercise “broad authority” over equipment used in connection
with radio and wire transmissions, “when the need arises, even
if it has not previously regulated in a particular area.” FCC Br.
at 17. This is an extraordinary proposition. “The
[Commission’s] position in this case amounts to the bare
suggestion that it possesses plenary authority to act within a
given area simply because Congress has endowed it with some
authority to act in that area. We categorically reject that
suggestion.

Good stuff. Now it's back to Congress, where the battles will continue -- and where this belonged in the first place.

USA Today and Churchill Club Put Public in Dark

UPDATED

Tom Foremski, over at Silicon Valley Watcher, notes that the Churchill Club teamed up with USA Today on an event about the future of media -- and barred the press. I enjoyed Tom's humorous call for assistance (I LOL at the picture he posted), but unfortunately found out about this travesty too late to weigh in before the event.

As Tom put it, "How quaintly dictatorial. No press, no lunch, no questions."

USA Today calls itself the "nation's newspaper." It should be embarrassed to be a part of such a thing. I hope Kevin Maney, the moderator of the program (and someone I like and admire), isn't planning to write a story or column off of this no-press-allowed event.

UPDATE: See Kevin's response below.

The Churchill Club expansively tells us its mission is about information, individuals, ideas -- and then pulls an absurd move like this.

Absurd how? Here's how. If there was a non-journalist blogger in the room, he or she is under no obligation to keep what was said a secret.

The Wall Street Journal learned about the new world two years ago, at the first "D: All Things Digital" conference. The gathering was officially off the record (and working journalists were asked to agree to this in advance), but that didn't stop bloggers from ably covering the thing. The Journal changed its policy the next year.

Back to the Churchill Club silliness: I'm hoping that we'll see a report soon on a blog. And if anyone who was attending wishes to be a guest blogger here, I'll be happy to accommodate you.

Kevin Maney responds:

Concerns about the no-press policy -- which we only started hearing about after the event -- have made us rethink the way we'd handle it next year. Yes, it does seem silly in this day and age. But a little history helps explain why the policy was that way in the first place.

This event grew out of something USA Today had been doing for many years: getting a group of tech CEOs together to talk about a hot industry issue. In the past, we always did it in a USAT conference room -- where, of course, there would be no other press and no general public. We'd get a discussion going, edit the transcripts, then put it in the paper.

About 18 months ago, I suggested that an audience might enjoy seeing those discussions live, and that it would add some excitement. After trying to figure out how to do it, we contacted Churchill and suggested a joint event. We'd get the panel together and use the transcripts in the paper a week later -- so we could take time to edit and package the material well. Churchill would gather an audience and take care of logistics.

That left us with a concern about getting scooped about our own panel. The first of these events took place last May. We decided to bar other press. To give you an idea about how much things have changed so quickly, last year we heard not a peep about that policy. This year, of course, it's different. We just automatically went with the same policy, but maybe that's not the right way to handle it in the future. We're all figuring out this new world as we go, and that's exactly what's happening here.

I'd like to think that the Churchill panel is an act of openness on our part. We could've kept doing the panels in closed rooms. Instead, we chose to let others in on the process. We're trying to do the right thing, not the wrong thing.

As for not taking audience questions, that's just a function of time. Five panelists, one hour. There is barely time for my questions, much less anyone else's.

As for no lunch... um... there is no free lunch.

My response: Had I known about this method in last year's panel, I would have objected then. If you're going to invite the public to an event, invite the entire public. Period.

You expect this kind of thing from the Bush administration and other information control freaks. A newspaper should know better.

Pure Speculation Makes 'News'

UPDATED

Amazingly, a blogger's rank speculation that a major news organization is using comment spam to lower his site's Google ranks -- he offers nothing in the way of serious evidence, in my opinion -- has led to an article on Wired News. I decline to point to the article, because I'd be giving this thing currency I don't believe it deserves.

The blogger, Nick Lewis, whose work I do respect in many ways, asked list members if they wanted to go on the record. Jimmy Wales, of the Wikipedia project, posted a pungent reply, a portion of which goes:

You might not like me to go on record about this, since I say it's ludicrous. If the media is interested, what I'll say is: tinfoil hats and black helicopters have more credibility, to my mind.

Trace the ip number to somewhere or someone interesting, and you've got a story. As it is, you've got spammers acting in ways that are incomprehensible.

As I understood the discussion on the list, the blogger seemed to think that because the IP addresses of the spammers couldn't be traced back to the Big News Organization, that was somehow a big hint that his theory must be true. After all, they'd be clever enough to hide their tracks, right? Wink, nudge...

Sheesh.

UPDATE: Seth Finkelstein offers an alternative explanation.

PR Blog Interview

PR practitioner and blogger Jeremy Pepper called and asked a bunch of questions. I answered them, and the result is here.

(Caution: There are some odd characters -- print type, I mean -- in the text. I speculate it's not rendering properly on my Mac. I've notified Jeremy Pepper.)

Casting the Blog Movie (Or Getting Bloggers to Point to Your Page)

Funny...

Operating Systems and Recent History

(I'm writing a periodic column for the Financial Times. Here's the one that appeared today.)

Early last week, Bill Gates demonstrated Microsoft’s next Windows desktop computer operating system at a conference for manufacturers of computer hardware. Later in the week Apple started selling its latest version of the Macintosh operating system, known as Mac OS X Tiger.

Although the Microsoft product is a long way from hitting the retail marketplace, Gates’s talk garnered lots of coverage in the trade and popular media. The timing, coming next to the Apple launch, was part of the reason; the media can not resist the Microsoft versus Apple story. But the Tiger release and Microsoft hypefest were only the latest engagements in a never-ending campaign for the hearts, minds and wallets of computer users. Their interests, not corporate power games, are why this matters.

Dave Winer: A Toast

I still remember the moment I saw a big piece of the future. It was mid-1999, and Dave Winer called to say there was something I had to see.

He showed me a web page. I don’t remember what the page contained except for one button. It said, "Edit This Page" -- and, for me, nothing was ever the same again.

I clicked the button. Up popped a text box containing plain text and a small amount of HTML, the code that tells a browser how to display a given page. Inside the box I saw the words that had been on the page. I made a small change, clicked another button that said, "Save this page" and voila, the page was saved with the changes. The software, still in prerelease mode, turned out to be one of the earliest blog applications.

Dave was a leader in a move that brought back to life the promise, too long unmet, that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, had wanted from the start. Berners-Lee envisioned a read/write Web. But what had emerged in the 1990s was an essentially read-only Web on which you needed an account with an ISP to host your web site, special tools, and/or HTML expertise to create a decent site.

What Dave and the other early blog pioneers did was a breakthrough. They said the Web needed to be writeable, not just readable, and they were determined to make doing so dead simple.

Thus, the read/write Web was truly born again. We could all write, not just read, in ways never before possible. For the first time in history, at least in the developed world, anyone with a computer and Internet connection could own a press.

***

The words above are adapted from my book We the Media, which was published last year. The book is a result of the blog I started in 1999, a blog largely inspired by Dave. The past few years of experimentation and change further inspired me to leave a great newspaper job early this year, to try and see if I could help move along the notion of citizen journalism.

His early fueling of the blog is hardly Dave's only accomplishment. He's been a leader in RSS and podcasting, and has a way of seeing key pieces of the future before the rest of us.

I don't always agree with Dave. But even the disagreements have been instructive. When someone is ahead of things in so many ways for so long, you listen and learn.

Dave just celebrated his 50th birthday, and has been feted by many for that milestone. I add my good wishes here, with my certainty that he has many more years and achievements yet to come.

Backfence Launches

UPDATED

I'm happy to see that Backfence.com's first community sites have launched (serving McLean and Reston, Virginia). They're off to a good start.

What we're all waiting to see, of course, is what happens down the road. Will they achieve critical mass? Will they be business successes? (One plainly depends on the other.) Will this model scale to a mass of sites that all pretty much run themselves?

Hyper-local is gaining mindshare fast. In addition to Backfence, some news organizations have launched these kinds of sites (see the Northwest Voice and Bluffton Today, both of which are connected to new print publications as well as the "legacy" newspaper companies that run them); more are coming. I'm
also very much looking forward to what Mike Orren and team do with Pegasus News.

They all join projects that have been smartly under way for some time, in places like Roswell, Georgia and Brattleboro, Vermont. The more the merrier.

These are crucial experiments, and my best wishes go with the pathbreakers who are pushing this ahead. We'll all be going to school on each others' work for some time to come.

Newspapers Aren't in Free Fall, But Readership is Dropping Fast

AP: Newspaper circulation drops 1.9 percent. Newspaper circulation reached a recent peak in 1984 but has been declining steadily over the past decade as other forms of media compete for the attention of readers, including cable television and the Internet.

Listening Too Much to the Readers?

Presstime: Nielsens for the Print World. As Publisher Augustine Edwards told USA Today in December, “I am not of the school that says, ‘Eat porridge, it’s good for you.’ I’m focused not on what people should be reading, but in uniting them around what they want to be reading.” Among other plans, Edwards says he wants to base reporter salaries on how many hits their stories generate. This, many say, could be the state of American journalism in the near future if standards aren’t put into place to prevent it.

In the 1980s, when the online possibilities of news publishing were starting to become clearer, a smart man told me something that I started telling other journalists: "One of these days, we're going to find out what people actually want to read."

He was referring to the granular nature of data. We can't know what people are reading in the printed newspaper. We can know exactly what they're choosing to read online -- or at least what stories they're starting to read online.

Someone has to decide what stories get to the top of the first page. Maybe it's editors. Maybe it's the community.

If popularity rules, then the nature of the community will be what counts if we believe in serious journalism. Attract people who believe what they read in supermarket tabloids and on Fox News, and they'll make decisions in a certain manner. Attract other kinds of folks, and they'll make other kinds of decisions.

(Updated to correct spelling of "Nielsens"; thanks, Scott.)

Fueling the Bubble

The Seattle Times is running a pair of stories today under the headine "Flipping real estate ... without getting burned" -- a reference to the growing American practice of buying property with the intention of immediately reselling it for a profit.

The "without getting burned" part of the headline in the printed newspaper is in a much smaller type size than the first part of the headline. That difference in emphasis is a metaphor for the problems with this package of stories and current "journalism" on real estate in America.

The Seattle area is not quite as overheated a market as California. Still, it's plenty hot. People here and other such cities are flipping homes like crazy to take advantage of what they see as a route to quick and painless wealth.

It'll work for some. Yet this game is a classic bubble activity: depending on the greater fools who'll take the losses when the music stops.

The newspaper's stories have the usual caveats. But in my view they don't offer the level of strenuous warning that they should.

What we need are news articles about the people who lost money in previous bubbles resembling this one, such as in Japan in the 1990s, and Houston in the 1980s. What we're getting is, in effect, encouragement to join the crowd that's inflating a new bubble, more dangerous by far than even the stock bubble of the late '90s.

Why more dangerous? Because the buyers now are being inveigled by lenders who offer nothing-down and interest-only loans, to borrowers who would not have come close to qualifying for loans in a less frothy time.

The LA Times, meanwhile, has a story (reg req) today about Latinos in the booming southern California real estate market. In an anecdote about one family's successful "purchase" the paper writes: "After two months of shopping for a mortgage they could afford, they qualified for two loans that required no down payment. Their savings covered the closing costs and they moved into the house in September."

It's obviously a good thing for more people from more diverse backgrounds to be building equity via home ownership. But this kind of risk could put these people in the financial hole forever, if the bubble bursts now and they find themselves under water on a nothing-down loan.

This is going to get so ugly.