Tim McGuire: Let’s not let Medill Innocence Project be another Hazelwood. The bullies who want to hamstring great student journalism need to be stopped.

Amen.

Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols believe that “journalists deserve subsidies, too.” They argue that America is “nearing a point where we will no longer have more than minimal resources (relative to the nation’s size) dedicated to reporting the news.”

There’s every reason to dispute their woe-is-us assumption. There’s even more reason to say they are wildly off-base in calling for special subsidies for journalists.

The authors, longstanding activists in media reform, are exceedingly well-meaning. And they are more accurate than not when they say:

We seek to renew a rich if largely forgotten legacy of the American free-press tradition, one that speaks directly to today’s crisis. The First Amendment necessarily prohibits state censorship, but it does not prevent citizens from using their government to subsidize and spawn independent media.

Indeed, the post-colonial press system was built on massive postal and printing subsidies. The first generations of Americans never imagined that the market would provide sound or sufficient journalism. The notion was unthinkable. They established enlightened subsidies, which broadened the marketplace of ideas and enhanced and protected core freedoms. Their initiatives were essential to America’s progress.

If the authors had only pursued their logic, they’d have ended up at the only sensible conclusion — that taxpayers could well subsidize the equivalent of the postal and printing subsidies they celebrate (among many other infrastructure supports that helped get the news from one place to another, such as roads, never mind the variety of other government help that’s gone to news organizations over the past several centuries.

What would following their logic lead us to in a digital world? That’s easy: We should collectively install dark fiber to every home and business where it’s feasible to do so, and put fiber as close to the ones that are too remote to make sense otherwise. It should be “dark fiber” — that is, data lines not controlled by government but available for others to light up to provide services for users.

This would not be about journalism only, any more than building roads in the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries was about helping newspapers deliver their goods to people’s homes and businesses. It would be about boosting trade of services and information (for-profit and not-for-profit), one part of which would be media.

We are seeing an explosion of creativity and innovation in media and journalism right now. Entrepreneurs and big companies alike are experimenting in new forms of journalism and ways to pay for it.

We have never had so much high-quality coverage in some areas, such as technology, as we have today. We have never had so much truly local conversation that has high value as we have today. And we will have vastly more tomorrow.

We may well be losing, at least temporarily, some of what Alex Jones calls “accountability journalism” — hard-nosed reporting of what powerful institutions, including government, are doing with our money and, in some cases, our lives. But to assume it will disappear and not be replaced, especially given some of the experiments we’re seeing, is grossly premature.

But Nichols and McChesney make that worst-case assumption, and veer off to this conclusion:

Saving newspapers may be impossible. But we can save journalism. Step one is to begin debating ways for enlightened public subsidies to provide a competitive and independent digital news media. Also, we should greatly expand funding for public and community media, and establish policies that help convert dying daily newspapers into post-corporate low-profit news operations that realize the potential of the Internet. If we do so, journalism and democracy will not just survive. They will flourish.

We don’t need government support of this kind. It will lead us down a path that media reformers will rue: licensing of journalists, picking of winners and other pernicious outcomes.

Government surely does have a role, no question. But it should be to create the fundamental communications infrastructure on which tomorrow’s journalism can thrive.

Wall Street Journal: Lawyerese Goes Galactic as Contracts Try to Master the Universe – WSJ.com. Lawyers for years have added language to some contracts that stretches beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. But more and more people are encountering such everywhere-and-forever language as entertainment companies tap into amateur talent and try to anticipate every possible future stream of revenue.

Big Media companies have figured out that they can profit handsomely by persuading amateurs to make fools of themselves. That’s bad enough, but the really sleazy part of this is not rewarding the performers more fairly, if they reward them at all.

It’s one thing to host a website where others post their work and reserve rights to reuse that work, but still ensuring that the creators own the work in question. As long as everyone knows what’s going on, there’s no problem. It’s another thing to take this to wild extremes, as Hollywood does.

When you are in a position of taking something with what you’ve created to a big-media company, you need to recognize that they hold all the power. This is why we need better mechanisms for pushing some of the power back to the creators. I’m working on some ideas and will be sharing them here, soon.

Linking to things you consider interesting is a fundamental part of being a creative Web person. The entire point of links, however, is to send people to other places.

Unfortunately, some sites are creating link aggregations that appear to have another purpose: keeping you as long as possible inside their own garden and only letting you out if you persist. It’s a shoddy practice, and from my perspective it appears to be a growing one.

Go to the homepage of Slate, as I just did, and you’ll see the following list, a new feature the publication calls “The Slatest” — links to journalism on the Web that Slate considers especially worth seeing:

Hmmm. That top item about banks too big to fail sounds interesting. You click on it and you’re taken to this page:

Well, that’s not especially helpful. So you click again on the top item, and you’ll find this:

You start to ask yourself if you can ever read the actual story that Slate finds so worthy. It turns out that you can, if you click inside the long description of the piece — a summary that basically rewrites the original — on a hyperlink that finally, finally takes you to the original journalism.

Making users jump through hoops creates disdain, not loyalty. Let’s hope the beta version of Slatest gets replaced by something truly useful. Right now, what they’re doing is annoying and little else.

UPDATED

More than 14 months after running an editorial with an egregious factual error, the Washington Post has yet to correct or explain its mistake.

Recapping from an earlier item here: The Post suggested that the Nobel Peace Prize that went to President Obama should have been awarded instead to Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian woman who was shot and killed during the post-election protests earlier in Iran this year.

The Post failed to do its homework, as the Atlantic’s James Fallows noted in detail (here, here). The Nobel Peace Prize rules are clear: The only time it can be awarded after death is when the honoree had already been named “but who had died before he/she could receive the Prize on December 10.”

An editorial page concerned with accuracy would correct such a mistake. The Post, despite knowing about this, has not. Draw your own conclusion.

UPDATE: Still uncorrected as of February 9, 2011.

Ben Goldacre, a British doctor, writer and broadcaster, runs a brilliant website called Bad Science, where he routinely demolishes crappy reporting in the media. His most recent post, Aids denialism at the Spectator, is a classic of the genre. Essential reading if you care about science journalism…

As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Why Traditional News Organizations Should Make Media Education a Priority”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)

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As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Why Parents and Teachers Should Care”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)

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As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Law”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)

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As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Why Journalism is Still Important”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)

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