(This is the seventeenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen [...]
(This is the sixteenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen [...]
I’ll be speaking next Tuesday at lunchtime at the Berkman Center. Topic (and link for RSVP):
Mediactive: Why media consumers, not just creators, need to be active users.
[...]I’ll be speaking at the Where 2.0 conference next month in San Jose, about journalists are using, and can use, location-related products and services. The talk is called Where Does Journalism Go?
You can get a 25 percent discount by using this code — whr09rdr — when registering.
[...]The Cronkite School at Arizona State is offering a summer New Media Academy “for adults who want to understand how communication is changing and how to set up and maintain a fully functional, multimedia-rich Web site.”
[...]ProPublica has launched the citizen-journalism portion of its operation, or at least the first iteration. By posting The Obama Team’s Disclosure Documents and asking readers to help figure out any potential conflicts of interest or other facts that are worth knowing, the site is doing what newspapers could [...]
Combining mobility, time and location is becoming one of the most valuable techniques of media creation. Last week, some students and I did a small experiment that demonstrates how easy this is to do, and suggests all kinds of possibilities for journalistic follow-ups.
[...] UPDATED
It’s hardly surprising when someone fires back at a harsh critic of his or her employer’s competence and/or ethics. But when that someone is superstar New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and the return fire takes the form, in part, of “Fuck you,” it raises a few eyebrows — [...]
Accompanying Simon Johnson’s remarkable, must-read Atlantic article, “The Quiet Coup,” is this chart:
What’s not noted here — or in most traditional media coverage of the meltdown — is something that everyone should understand. These profits were an illusion in the end. They existed just long enough, [...]
Jay Rosen: Introducing the new Huffington Post Investigative Fund (And My Own Role in It) The announcement of its birth, along with the $1.75 million starter budget, is really the launch of a new Internet-based news organization with a focus on original reporting. You might say the Fund’s [...]
Flowing Data: Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America
Brilliant. I was working in the Midwest when Walmart’s destructive march across the nation’s heartland was just gaining strength. This visualization looks like the nuclear explosion map in old movies, and the imagery — if over the top — is thought-provoking.
Updated with [...]
Google is pointing from its home page today to a page about World Tuberculosis Day and that, in turn, points to the Stop TB Partnership, a nonprofit organization. A worthy cause, and good for Google for pointing to it.
Consider the power of this endorsement. [...]
I’ll cross-post the media related items here, but for the next 14 days you’ll find me over at BoingBoing.
[...]Chris Anderson (Columbia University): What’s So Hard About Local? Where should our foundation dollars go? Perhaps they should go towards assuring that the so-called “lowly” (and yet, so oddly difficult to fund either a peer-produced or market based substitute for!! so much for lowly!) beat reporter, police bureau chief, [...]
The Obama administration promises it will be accountable in how it spends our (children’s) money in the new stimulus legislation. On the Recovery.Gov site you’ll see, under the heading “Accountability and Transparency,” some strong rhetoric:
This is your money. You have a right to know where it’s going and how [...]
New York Times: Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Blog! Starting today, The Local is an online news site for these communities. But if we build it right together, The Local will be something much more: a glorious if cacophonous chorus of your voices singing the song of life [...]
HerdictWeb: “the first collaborative, real-time map of Internet accessibility and it needs your input.”
This is a fabulous new Berkman Center project. Please consider joining the herd.
Congrats to the team that put this together.
[...]Hearst Corporation announced today that its San Francisco Chronicle newspaper is undertaking critical cost-saving measures including a significant reduction in the number of its unionized and nonunion employees. If these savings cannot be accomplished within weeks, Hearst said, the Company will be forced to sell or close the newspaper.
We’re [...]
UPDATED
Forbes: Boss Got Raise As Philly Papers Tanked. As the parent company of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News slid toward the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing it made over the weekend, one employee did well on the pay front: CEO Brian P. Tierney.
How disgusting is this?
The arrogance of the [...]
Nice: ProPublica is launching ChangeTracker — “an experimental new tool that watches pages on whitehouse.gov, recovery.gov and financialstability.gov so you don’t have to. When the White House adds or deletes anything— say a blog post, or executive order—ChangeTracker will let you know.”
The site leverages Versionista, a service that [...]
Consumerist: Lawsuits: Law Firm ‘Jones Day’ Usurps Monster Cable For Stupidest Trademark Lawsuit Ever. Jones Day is a law firm that doesn’t want anyone else to use standard, everyday formatting for links in news stories about its staff, and it succeeded in forcing a small start-up to cave in [...]
The Center for Media and Democracy is looking for an executive director. More in this Position Announcement.
[...]Accepting an award from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably “the best general education that an American citizen can get” today.
Perhaps he was playing to his audience, at least to [...]
(This is the fifteenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen [...]
(This is the fourteenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen [...]
My friend and colleague Tim McGuire says, “Bloodless journalism and mindless stats are not the way to report this recession”.
[...]Boston Globe: Media entrepreneurs test new ways to get the message across. Boston was home to the first American newspaper. A Medford radio station was among the first to try selling advertising to support its programming, in the early 1920s. Researcher Ray Tomlinson was working in Cambridge when he [...]
Capitol Alert: Eleven papers run A-1 editorial blasting lawmakers, Schwarzenegger.In a rare move, at least 11 California newspapers ran a front-page editorial on Sunday blasting the Legislature and governor for failing to solve the state’s budget woes. “The once great state of California today becomes a national disgrace,” the [...]
Andy Oram’s “Validators” is short fiction “based on the premise that journalism had been replaced by Internet access.” Intriguing…
[...]There’s a debate under way in the newspaper/journalism corner of the blogosphere and Twittersphere, spurred by an op-ed commentary in the New York Times earlier this week. The piece, by Yale’s chief investment officer, David Swensen, and his colleague Michael Schmidt, a Yale financial analyst, starts with a questionable [...]
Michael Goldfarb, a web editor for the right-wing Weekly Standard, was a blogger on the McCain campaign last fall. In a Q & A with CJR, he says, among other things, that he was told his role would be to “attack the press” in the blog:
And that struck [...]
I’ll be in New York on Feb. 10 to speak at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. My topic is considering ways to expand and extend the ecosystem around books:
We know now that many books, especially timely non-fiction, can become major elements of [...]
Good news: EveryBlock, the terrific local data site started by Adrian Holovaty, is launching a partnership with the New York Times. More here.
This is part of the future for media entrepreneurs: partnering with established companies to fill in gaps and take advantage of existing clout. Good for [...]
Here’s a piece I wrote for Talking Points Memo on a subject I’ve covered here before. It begins:
Our government’s current operating principle seems to be bailing out people who were culpable in the financial meltdown. If so, journalists are surely entitled to billions of dollars.
Why? Journalists were grossly deficient [...]
Washington Post: New Obama Orders on Transparency, FOIA Requests. In a move that pleased good government groups and some journalists, President Obama issued new orders today designed to improve the federal government’s openness and transparency. The first memo instructs all agencies and departments to “adopt a presumption in favor” [...]
From the Los Angeles Times: Rosa Brooks’ Dec. 11 column described Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich as “newly indicted.” He has only been charged in a federal corruption case.
Huh?
[...]Gene Koo: Obama’s non-reductive rhetoric. The technology to bypass top-down media is one cornerstone of Obama’s success as a communicator. His nonreductive rhetoric is another.
Jason Kottke notes the new robots.txt file at whitehouse.gov — down to a single “disallow” from more than 2,400 yesterday.
[...]This is the kind of thing that makes me crazy. The Washington Post runs an interesting story — Obama’s $100,000-Plus Donors Were Able to Give to Several Entities — about “nearly 100″ wealthy families who’ve been giving big bucks to Obama. The story is based on data the paper [...]
[...]Ethan Zuckerman: Is ad-supported journalism viable in a pay-for-performance age? (I)t’s possible that the way we’ve built media in the United States can’t survive a transition to a more rational market.
Glenn Greenwald (Salon): Establishment Washington unifies against prosecutions. As confirmed accounts emerged years ago of chronic presidential lawbreaking, warrantless eavesdropping, systematic torture, rendition, “black site” prisons, corruption in every realm, and all sorts of other dark crimes, where were journalists and other opinion-making elites? Very few of them with [...]
StinkyJournalism.org: The Unspoken Peril for “Citizen Journalists” Surprise! You Owe the IRS Some Gift Tax! Is the “donation” of a citizen’s content (video, articles, commentaries, images) to for-profit media outlets that exceeds a fair market value of $12,000 in any single year subject to gift tax? Judging from the [...]
The Citizen Media Law Project has a terrific explainer up today — “Documenting the 2009 Presidential Inauguration” — for people who are planning to be in Washington for the Obama inauguration. It explains:
During the Inauguration, heightened security measures will be in place across Washington, D.C., particularly in the areas [...]
Jay Rosen: Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized– connected “up” to Big Media but [...]
Lasantha Wickramatunga: And Then They Came for Me. No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces - and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the last few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. [...]
NBPC New Media Institute 2009: The National Black Programming Consortium and its National Minority Consortia partners invite you to participate in the 4th Annual New Media Institute (NMI). The NMI is a unique professional development program working to transform producers of color from television producers into media-makers who can [...]
The New York Times has been among the prime examples of media organizations that refuse to call torture what it is: torture. The euphamism that the Times and other traditional (and cowardly) media outlets have been using has typically been “enhanced interrogation techniques” — despite the fact that at least [...]
From the top of the current LA Times homepage:
Could we be reaching a bottom soon in the real estate market?
UPDATED (with response from one of the authors)
LA Observed has a post about how KRON TV in San Francisco disinvited the authors of a new book from a talk-show appearance after discovering that the book, No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News [...]
NY Times: Consumers Union to Buy a Blog From Gawker. It will become part of a new division of Consumers Union, and the current editors will remain. No plans are under way to change the coverage or to begin charging for the site. “We don’t want to acquire the [...]
(This is an HTML reprint of an essay (PDF) of the same title, recently published as part of the Media Re:public project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. I’m posting it here with some links to source material that don’t appear in [...]
UPDATED
One of the most intriguing current media legal cases pits GateHouse Media, which owns a pile of newspapers in New England (and elsewhere) against the New York Times Co., owner of the Boston Globe and Boston.com. (UPDATE: A Judge has denied, for now, an injunction.) I’ve [...]
In this season for giving, let me point you to Global Voices Online, which aggregates blogs and other citizen-based media from around the globe. GV, a non-profit organization (I’m an advisor), has been supported in recent years with foundation grants, but it needs wider support. I’ve sent some funds, [...]
If I wasn’t in Phoenix today I’d be at Creative Commons’ Birthday Party 2008 in San Francisco tonight.
Creative Commons deserves your support even if you can’t go to the event. Donate here.
[...]Over the past year and several months, Persephone Miel has been leading a Berkman Center project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, called Media Re:public:
an assessment of the changes in new media over the past several years and … a sober look at the successes and ongoing [...]
The people who run the Pulitzer Prizes, undoubtedly America’s premier journalism awards, have taken some useful steps into the 21st Century with new rules that welcome online-only entries. From the official rules (PDF):
Entries for journalism awards must be based
on material coming from a text-based United
States newspaper [...]
David Carr, NY Times: Stoking Fear Everywhere You Look. Every modern recession includes a media séance about how horrible things are and how much worse they will be, but there have never been so many ways for the fear to leak in. The same digital dynamics that drove the [...]
UPDATED
Two interesting developments today at the New York Times online:
The first, and most noteworthy, is the paper’s welcome discovery that aggregation of and links to things it didn’t produce in-house improve the audience experience. As the graphic shows, the green-highlighted items below the story [...]
And the PDF fact sheet.
This devices, which won’t be available until next year (probably spring), is potentially the closest thing yet to the perfect tool for folks who are looking for the ultimate in smart phones with serious text capability. Incredible specs…
I drool.
[...]I’m a signer of a letter on a new site called “An Open Transition,” where a group of folks led by Larry Lessig:
UPDATED
The New York Times’ David Barstow has an astonishing piece in today’s paper, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” about former “drug czar” and retired general Barry McCaffrey, one of many retired military people working as supposedly independent analysts for various news organizations but who are anything but independent.
The story’s [...]
Every time I load a new page on the Washington Post’s website, the following pop-over ad interferes with my reading.
I keep clicking the X in the corner indicating my lack of interest in participating in the survey, but to no avail. This thing won’t leave [...]
I don’t plan to click through to that one…
But to the rest of you: Happy Thanksgiving, our finest holiday.
Take a look at today’s Wikipedia entry on today’s Mumbai terrorist attacks — a comprehensive and valuable addition to the breaking news we’re getting from TV and other sources. There are two fundamental elements to note: the rapid updating and the long list of links at the bottom.
No, we [...]
Excellent round-up and sound predictions by Jeff Jarvis today in “A scenario for news” — and some good reasons not to be pessimistic.
[...]There are big changes afoot in the Knight Fellowships program at Stanford University:
Beginning with the 2009-10 fellowship year, the program will put a new emphasis on journalistic innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership.
These are among the premier journalism fellowships in the U.S., and the changes — among other things, [...]
Mark Glaser: MediaShift . Can Crowdfunding Help Save the Journalism Business? Bands do it. Filmmakers do it. President-elect Barack Obama made an artform out of it. “It” is crowdfunding, getting micro-donations through the Internet to help fund a venture. The question is whether crowdfunding can work on a larger [...]
Josh Marshall observes the 8th birthday of Talking Points Memo today and suggests there’s even better to come.
TPM is one of the great examples of how new media can work. Marshall is one of the best journalists of our time, helping to reinvent our craft. He deserves our [...]
Editor & Publisher: API Hosting ‘Crisis Summit’ for Newspaper Industry. The American Press Institute (API) will host an invitation-only, closed-door “summit conference” Nov. 13 in which 50 CEO-level executives will ponder ways to revive the newspaper business.
The newspaper industry’s big issue is pretty simple. It’s trying to [...]
The AP reports, “Palin derides anonymous critics on Fox as cowards,” a reference to a recent Fox News segment in which a correspondent relayed a variety of negative attacks from, he said, members of the McCain campaign staff against Sarah Palin.
No matter what you think about Palin in [...]
I know is was supposed to be up there just for a month, but the great Google Search 2001 page now returns: 404 - Page Not Found. What a shame — this was an invaluable feature.
[...]Looking forward to BlogBoat 1.0 on Sunday, Nov. 9 in Ghent, Belgium. The “Meeting of Minds” gathering will explore citizen media and, among other things, its relationship to traditional journalism.
[...]David Ardia at the Citizen Media Law Project has a terrific post, “The Role of Citizen Media in Ensuring Fair Elections,” with a long list of valuable resources. Don’t miss this.
[...]The Houston Chronicle reports a poll that “finds 23% of Texans think Obama is Muslim” but stops there.
If I ran a newspaper in Texas, I’d make it a mission to help that quarter of the population learn a) that Obama is not a Muslim; and b) that, as Colin [...]
The New York Times’ obituary of Tony Hillerman, dead at 83, covers his life and work with great detail. He was indeed one of our finest mystery writers. His work centered around the Southwest and were set around Native Americans and their lives.
But I wanted particularly to mention [...]
Associated Press: September new home sales rise by 2.7 percent. Sales of new homes recorded an unexpected increase in September as median home prices dropped to the lowest level in four years, the Commerce Department reported Monday…
In the universe most of us inhabit, crashing prices generally lead to [...]
It’s great to be back in Barcelona, after a too-quick visit to Greece, for a conference that is not the usual kind for me. This one is called Kosmopolis, an “International Literature Fest” spanning the next three days. I’m honored to be included on [...]
Traditional journalists, and traditional journalism educators, remain pretty suspicious of blogging in lots of places. But if what I heard in two days of conferencing in Athens and Thessaloniki (the latter is Greece’s second-largest city) is an indication of the overall situation, there’s a larger-than-usual gulf between older and [...]
I’ll be in Barcelona later this week. Might be fun to connect some bloggers, perhaps Friday. More later…
[...]Do you have an idea for a community information product or service? There are just two weeks to go — November 1, 2008 is the last day anyone with a good idea can submit an application to the Knight News Challenge media innovation contest.
The worldwide competition offers up to [...]
David Silverberg interviewed me for a series he’s running on DigitalJournal.com. My entry is called “The Journalist With a Business Edge“.
[...]Dean Reynolds, CBS News: Reporter’s Notebook: Seeing How The Other Half Lives - From The Road: Maybe a front-running campaign like Obama’s that is focused solely on victory doesn’t have the time to do the mundane things like print up schedules or attend to the needs of reporters. But [...]
In today’s Wall Street Journal story about the deflation of the housing bubble, “Housing Pain Gauge: Nearly 1 in 6 Owners ‘Under Water’,” consider this passage:
Stephanie and Jason Kirschenman thought they were being prudent when they agreed in late 2004 to buy a new four-bedroom home in Lodi, Calif., [...]
UPDATED
NY Times: Apple Denies ‘Citizen Journalist Report’. Apple’s stock took a brief roller coaster ride this morning after a CNN “citizen journalist” wrote that an “insider” reported that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the hospital with chest pains.
Aha! Those infernal citizen journalists are ruining the world!
Calm down. [...]
As Salon notes in “Skype sells out to China“, the eBay-owned service has collaborated with a Chinese company to enable spying on the allegedly encrypted messages that Skype users send each other to and from, and within, China. This disgusting sellout should surprise no one.
Skype and its corporate parent, [...]
Fellowship applications are now being accepted for:
Multimedia Reporting and Convergence Workshop
January 11-16, 2009 and March 22-27, 2009
The Knight Digital Media Center at the University of California, Berkeley is now accepting applications for week-long training sessions for mid-career journalists wishing to advance their multimedia skills. The workshops combine instruction in multimedia [...]
[...]CNET: Blogger jailing backfires on Malaysian government | Politics and Law. If the Malaysian government had hoped that the recent detention of controversial blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin would quell the country’s vociferous blogger community, it may need to look elsewhere.
E&P: Wash Post’s Brauchli: Newspapers Warned Readers of Economic Crisis. “There were good stories throughout, good stories about the risks,” Brauchli added. “The truth is, there was always skeptical coverage by the major newspapers. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, all have written [...]
In a long investigative piece on John McCain and the gambling industry - “For McCain and Team, a Host of Ties to Gambling” — the New York Times has done something noteworthy beyond excellent reporting. It doesn’t adopt the misleading word “gaming” that the gambling industry prefers to use [...]
Citizen Media Law Project: New Insurance Program for Bloggers Offered by the Media Bloggers Association. The new insurance, which is currently available only to members of the Media Bloggers Association (MBA), provides coverage for defamation, invasion of privacy, and copyright infringement claims. Premiums start at $450 per year [...]
Google Moderator lets folks ask questions and vote on them. So do lots of other tools. The main thing that is interesting about this is that it comes from Google, which could give it critical mass in a hurry.
[...]Here’s the latest from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (funder of some of our work) on its 21st Century News Challenge, a contest awarding as much as $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news and information exchange. The deadline for [...]
