Media Literacy Week in Canada arrives in early November. Lots of valuable ideas here, some of which I’ll highlight in coming posts.

You may have noticed some site problems — so have we, and they appear to relate to the WordPress theme we’ve been using. We’ve disabled it for the time being until we figure out WTF has been happening to make the site slow to a crawl, so badly that it was affecting other sites on the server.

UPDATE: Looks like some of the old theme remains in the cache, which is preventing some comments from becoming visible. Arghhh… We’re working on that, too.

FURTHER UPDATE: Still working on the comments issue.

Google Maps can be used for much more than geography. Google Maps Mania shows off how designers have used the application to create easy-to-browse portfolios. This is done by replacing the map tiles with one’s own image tiles. (The post suggests CASA’s Image Cutter or Automatic Tile Cutter for creating tiles).

Google Maps Mania gives a nice nod to the gaming community for paving ground here by replacing tilesets with maps of the online worlds in which they spend their time (synthetic community journalism?). Designers are now figuring this out and it’d be nice to see what journalists can do with it. With newspaper archival in mind this week, an obvious crossover is a microfiche-style conversion of the day’s paper. However, far more creative uses seem possible.

Conversation comes slowly to major media organizations, but even when it does, it can be difficult to follow. Consider the following sequence:

On August 7, the New York Times published a Floyd Norris column criticizing General Electric for financial shenanigans that Norris called Enron-like in some respects. The piece was another bit of the accumulating evidence that the tenure of former CEO Jack Welch had sufficiently sleazy elements to call into question, to put it mildly, Welch’s super-duper-elite reputation.

GE, like most other big companies, pays legions of people to make bad news go away or at least be less bad. In a letter to the editor published Sept. 9 (the one-month delay is curious), the company’s “Executive Director, Communications and Public Affairs” objected to Norris’ column.

Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATED

You may have noticed — you could hardly miss it — the current blizzard of one-year anniversary stories about the fall of Lehman Brothers, an event that helped spark last fall’s financial meltdown. The coverage mainly reminds me that journalists failed to do their jobs before last fall’s crisis emerged, and have continued to fail since then.

It also reminds me of a few pet peeves about the way traditional journalists operate. So here’s a list of 11 things I’d insist on, just for starters, if I ran a news organization. Why 11? See the last item. Read the rest of this entry »

The context was very different, but the words of Shakespeare in Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, foretold what mainstream news in America has become: mediastorms of tales told by idiots, full sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In a Q&A on Tuesday at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, President Obama cautioned a group of 9th graders to be careful of what they post online. He was too cautious by half.

The question was from a student who wanted to be president some day and asked for advice on career paths. According to the White House transcript, he said, in the first of what he called “practical tips” for ambitious young people:

I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook — because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life. And when you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff. And I’ve been hearing a lot about young people who — you know, they’re posting stuff on Facebook, and then suddenly they go apply for a job and somebody has done a search and — so that’s some practical political advice for you right there.

The president may have been right about this in today’s world. I hope he’s wrong in tomorrow’s. Let’s unpack what he said to see why.

It’s absolutely true that young people make mistakes and do stupid things. Anyone who doesn’t commit youthful stupidities is either inhuman or stunningly boring and inconsequential. Who wants someone like that to be in charge of anything as an adult? Not me.

But it doesn’t follow, as the president suggested, that posting weird (to older people) things on the Web — in blogs, social networks and the like — should be an automatic turnoff or disqualification for a responsible job later on. The notion of punishing someone decades later for what he or she said or did as a teenager or college student just feels wrong to me.

A journalism student where I teach recently asked if it was advisable to have a personal blog or, if so, to be outspoken on it. He’d apparently been warned that it could put a crimp in his future journalism career plans.

I can’t say how others would react. I do know that if I were hiring someone today I’d want to know what (not if) he or she posted online, not to find disqualifying factors but to see if this is an interesting person. I’d take for granted that I might find some things that were risque or inappropriate for my current world. I’d expect to find things that would be “unjournalistic” in some ways, such as outspoken or foolish (or both) views on important people and issues. But I’d also remember my own ability, if not tendency, to be an idiot when I was that age. And I’d discount appropriately.

This is all about giving people what my friend Esther Dyson has called a “statute of limitations on stupidity.” If we don’t all start cutting each other more slack in this increasingly transparent (often by our own choice) society, we’ll only allow drones into positions of authority. Now that’s really scary.

We’re making progress, probably more than Obama gives us credit for. Recall that it was impossible for a Catholic to be president, until John F. Kennedy was elected. It was impossible for a divorced person to be elected until Ronald Reagan won. It was impossible for a former pot smoker to be president until Bill Clinton (who bizarrely claimed not to have inhaled) got elected. And so on.

How we make these judgements is neither clear nor simple. Robert McDonnell, a candidate for governor in Virginia, is taking hits for a 20-year-old master’s thesis in which he denounced programs that encouraged women to work outside the home and said working women were bad for families. He wants voters to ignore all this and concentrate on what he says are his positions now.

McDonnell deserves some slack, too, but he wrote the thesis when he was in his mid-30s, not his early 20s or younger. His record as a legislator since then has been extremely conservative, as well. What he said two decades ago is obviously more relevant, given the circumstances, than what a student posts on a high-school Facebook page today.

In the foreseeable future, we’ll elect a president who had blog or Facebook wall or MySpace page when she was a teenager and college student. By the standards of today she’ll be utterly disqualified for any serious political job. But because we’ll have grown as a society, not just more tolerant of flaws but understanding that we all have feet of clay in some respect, we’ll elect her anyway, because we’ll realize that the person she became — and how that happened — is what counts.

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters for America has pulled a horrifying (if you care about journalism) quote from an ABC News online report. In a post entitled “With one simple sentence, ABC News confirms the death of Beltway journalism,” Boehlert notes this line from ABC’s Dan Harris:

“While the media loves a good fight — even when the charges are unfounded — there may be more to conservatives’ complaints that play into larger concerns about the president on health care reform.”

One word: Yike.

It’s easy, and appropriate, to feel gloom mixed with contempt at the way some right-wing flamethrowers, abetted by mass media’s love of conflict, have turned President Obama’s webcast to the nation’s schoolchildren into a new socialist manifesto. They cherry-picked an innocuous idea from a lesson plan — the president asking kids to help him do his job better — and claimed it was radical ideology.

The Obama critics do have one thing right, though they don’t seem clear on the concept. They’re skeptical of what people in authority say. In this case skepticism has morphed into paranoia, as they claim children watching the talk could be indoctrinated by an authority figure who, in their view, is wrong on policy and morality.

Attempting to prevent children from hearing the president’s words is not just foolish, but counterproductive. I’m betting this has backfired, given kids’ tendency to seek out what adults tell them to stay away from.

The administration seems to believe that if all the information on a given issue is on the table — or in this case, on the Web — then the truth, or at least their version of it, will win out. (The president announced on Friday that with certain exceptions, the names of visitors to the White House would be posted for all to see). For all his modern impulses, President Obama’s press operation seems mired in a high school civics debate version of governance, where points are given for logic and argument.

That is not how the media works, however, in an environment that prizes engagement and conflict. The long town-hall process over health care, for example, has given ordinary citizens a voice but it has also produced hundreds of video clips of angry, scared Americans. For every aging secretary who can’t afford prescriptions, there is a small business owner who wants less government in their life, not more. Tropes like “death panels” may lack substance, but they make for pretty compelling viewing day after day.

In part, the outrage and hyperbole work because the mainstream media, insecure about their own status in an atomizing world, play into the tyranny of split-screen coverage where almost any claim — no matter how outlandish — becomes one side in “an interesting debate.” When not listening to talking heads, the traditional news outlets go to great efforts to get a microphone on vox populi. If the people, even if it is some unknown number, are hopping mad, we don’t want to be the last to tell you about it.

Bingo. Too bad Carr doesn’t take his own logic to a logical conclusion. He merely notes “how the media works” but doesn’t even suggest that journalists who cover these issues bear any responsibility for their preference to feed the lie machine instead of counter it. Oh, there have been a few stories pointing out the fundamental unreality on which the protests have been based, but vastly more on the protests themselves.

The most important concept, which Carr misses, is the one the media have abandoned in recent times: responsibility. Look again at the White House graphic at the top of this piece. The president is urging students “to take responsibility for their educations” because all the good teaching and parenting won’t be enough if the students themselves don’t care.

We share responsibility for knowing what we’re talking about. The traditional media’s unwillingness to help — part of its general collapse — means that, more and more, it’s up to the rest of us to figure things out for ourselves.

A common belief holds that once something gets onto the Internet, it’s there indefinitely. This is true, no doubt, for some things. Does anyone believe the Paris Hilton sex video will ever not be out there?

Assuming we could make this happen, the next step would be to lobby bloggers, to persuade them that saving their work to public archives would be a good idea. They could know that their work, if they chose, would be around for some time.

Nothing I heard in Washington begins to solve a more interesting problem, which is that so much of what we do (as opposed to view) these days comes from hyper-dynamically generated pages. Look at Everyblock, for example. How can we archive what the various pages that users create on the fly? (Should we? My belief is that, yes, we should know for posterity, in at least an aggregate sense, what was being created by the people who used the site.)

Right now, the blog idea seems like the low hanging fruit, though. I’m getting in touch with Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive to see if he’s interested, along with several of the folks who do the blogging software, and will let you know what they say.

The bottom line for all this is, I hope, obvious. If you are creating things, you should not just own them, but preserve them. This is one way to keep our work alive.