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.)
Chapter 6: Journalism is still important
2009
New Investigative Project
As newspapers fail, the news ecosystem is finding a way forward. This project, like ProPublica and Spot.us and several other projects, will help fill in the gaps. more…
Tracking Simulus Spending: Hire Some Unemployed Reporters
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 it’s being spent.more…
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 itself in these astoundingly varied and vibrant neighborhoods. more…
Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper than its Past
more…
11 Papers Run Corporate-Ordered Editorial
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 editorial began. The editorial ran in the MediaNews family of newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Daily News and Long Beach Press Telegram. more…
Endowing Newspapers: What Are We Saving, Anyway?
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 idea — that newspapers should be endowed as nonprofits in order to save them — and goes south from there. more…
Traditional Journalism’s Failure in Financial Crisis
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. more…
A Murdered Editor’s Final Letter: J’Accuse
Wickramatunga was the editor of the Sri Lankan Sunday Leader, newspaper that crusaded for honor and against corruption. Please read his final column to remember why journalism remains a vital, and sometimes noble, craft. more…
2008
New Berkman Report: State of Digital Media
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 challenges. more…
Pulitzer Prizes in the 21st Century
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. more…
Bogus Beliefs about Obama; Newspaper Does Only Part of Its Job
The Houston Chronicle reports a poll that “finds 23% of Texans think Obama is Muslim” but stops there. more…
Why People Consider Journalists Lower Than Dirt, Part 83,704
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 politics, everything that goes around comes around.
more…
Journalists and Communities: What I Told AJR
Below, you’ll find a pointer to Will Bunch’s American Journalism Review story about journalists’ disconnection with the communities they cover. He interviewed me by email for this piece, and quoted from what I told him — accurately and in context — at the end of the article. more…
Where Did “Citizen Journalist” Come From?
I had a call last week from a researcher for a big-name journalist, asking a question about the expression “citizen journalist”: more…
Bill Moyers on Media’s Future
Bill Moyers is headlining the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis, and just gave a powerful pitch for network neutrality and why journalism’s future is key to the future of democracy. There’s a live stream, worth watching. more…
McClatchy Defends its Honor, and Truth
The Knight Ridder, now McClatchy, Washington Bureau was a singular hero among journalists who value great reporting and honor back during the run-up to the Iraq war and its disastrous prosecution. I was, and remain, honored to have been employed by the same company during that period when so many other journalists abandoned their duties. more…
‘Deferential, complicit enablers’
That’s former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s description of Big Journalism during the Bush administration, especially during the run-up to the Iraq war. With all too few exceptions, it is true — and indelibly stains a craft from which we expect so much more. more…
Needed: Awards that Belatedly Recognize Great Journalism
Looking through the finalists for the 2008 Gerald Loeb Award, several things stand out. Despite the excellence of the work being cited, the list of finalists should raise a note of caution about at least one key metric for the ability of American business journalists to look at major problems before negative trends turn to economic calamity. more…
Newspaper Asks Bloggers for Help
Every newspaper should be a portal to the bloggers, Flickr and YouTube posters and others who are creating media about the towns and neighborhoods in the circulation area. That so few understand this is testament to the industry’s continuing cluelessness. more…
A Lie or Terrifying Negligence: Why Won’t Journalists Demand an Answer?
A truly extraordinary example of journalistic malfeasance is playing out right now. Attorney General Michael Mukasey told a San Francisco audience last week that the Bush administration was aware in the days before the 9/11 attacks that an Al Qaeda official was making calls from a “safe house in Afghanistan” to U.S. but that our government failed to act on that. more…
Housing Bubble Coverage: Defending the Indefensible
As I said in a previous posting, newspapers and broadcasters were raking in billions in advertising from the real estate and banking industries as this bubble inflated. I do not believe this is a coincidence. I also don’t believe it was deliberate malfeasance; but you just don’t see lots of tough coverage in media of the people and companies paying the bills. more…
A Small Breakthrough as Dallas Paper Asks Readers’ Help on JFK Assassination Documents
The Dallas Morning News implores its readers, “Help us examine the lost JFK files.” more…
New York Times Needs to Wake Up
Marc Andreessen has inaugurated “the New York Times Deathwatch” — and the data he cites should be giving the Times-folk nightmares. But then, the company’s board of directors is a particularly inept group considering the absolute need to move, fast, into the digital world for real, with all that means. more…
BBC: Afghan senate backs death penalty. Afghanistan’s upper house of parliament has issued a statement backing a death sentence for a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan. Pervez Kambakhsh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge. The UN has criticised the sentence and said the journalist did not have legal representation during the case. more…
Digital Entrepreneurship Needed Across All Media
A cliche of business holds that good ideas are a dime a dozen; it’s hard work and investment capital that turn them into businesses. As with most cliches, this one has a solid foundation of truth. more…
Justice Department’s Idiotic Shunning of Online Journalism Organization
Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall reports that he’s been “Banned at The DoJ” — taken off the email distribution list for press releases and the like. This has to be one of the more lame governmental PR decisions of the recent past. more…
2007
Deans in Fantasy Land
Jeff Jarvis ably deconstructs a NYT op-ed in which:
A herd of journalism-school deans wrote a predictable but also naive and possibly dangerous — and certainly not strategically forward-thinking — attack on media cross-ownership and the FCC’s loosening of its rules in today’s Times op-ed page. more…
Needed: Regulation to Prevent Journalists-Turned-Professors from Embarrassing Themselves
It’s hard to know where to begin in responding to David Hazinski’s “Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky,” an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he calls for regulation of citizen journalism: more…
My Business Week Interview
In the Business Week article I point to in the posting below, Steve Hamm quotes me (very) briefly. more…
New Nonprofit Investigative Journalism Project
Foundations are stepping into the breach left by downsizing media companies, and not a minute too soon. This effort will, if it works, be a serious contributor to the news scene. more…
Chauncey Bailey’s Story Isn’t Over
Editor & Publisher: Journos in Bay Area Launch ‘Chauncey Bailey Project’. In a collaboration reminiscent of the 1976 “Arizona Project,” more than two dozen San Francisco Bay Area journalists are launching the Chauncey Bailey Project to continue the investigative reporting the Oakland Post editor was pursuing when he was murdered on Aug. 2. more…
Chelyabinsk, Russia
These are students and faculty at Chelyabinsk State University in the heart of Russia, where I’m on a week-long visit to meet with journalists, scholars and media executives. The trip, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, has been eye-opening. more…
Citizen Media from Burma
SF Chronicle: Bloggers in Burma keep world informed during military crackdown.
Dodging a deadly military crackdown that has killed at least nine protesters, Burmese bloggers are on the front lines, providing news and photos of death and insurrection. more…
Community Foundations and Local News
I have an op-ed piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle urging the nation’s community foundations — which are holding a conference this week in San Francisco — to play a growing role in keeping local journalism vibrant. more…
El Tiempo: Blogs and More
El Tiempo, Colombia’s national daily paper, has been moving at a fairly good speed to incorporate conversational media into its corporate and journalistic DNA. It’s clearly among the leaders in Latin America, if not the leader. more…
Why American Newspapers are Dying, Part MMCCDXVI
Editor & Publisher: Many Won’t Run Next Two ‘Opus’ Strips With Sex Joke, Islam Reference. At least 25 of the 200 or so “Opus” client newspapers might not run the Sunday-only comic’s next two episodes, which feature Islamic references and a sex joke. more…
On the Road: Bogota
I’m in Colombia to give a talk tomorrow at a media conference sponsored by Andiarios, Colombia’s national newspaper association, and the U.S. State Department (which is paying for this trip). El Tiempo, the big local daily paper, ran a pre-conference interview, translated from English to Spanish by the paper’s manager of new media, Guillermo Franco, whom I met when he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard several years ago. more…
Any Plans to Pay Them?
Scott Karp reports “The Huffington Post Allows Top Commenters To Become Bloggers.” I wish he’d asked the obvious question: Will any of these people get paid? As far as I know, Huffington doesn’t pay her bloggers, even the well-known ones. more…
Chauncey Bailey and Don Bolles
Thirty-two years ago, Don Bolles, a reporter with the Arizona Republic, was mortally wounded in Phoenix when a bomb destroyed his car. His murder sparked the Arizona Project, an unprecedented gathering of investigative journalists from around America who traveled to Arizona to investigate the corruption that, everyone understood, had led to Bolles’ killing. more…
News Corp.’s Laughable Wall Streed “Editorial Review” System
Of course the “Editorial Review Committee” being created to supposedly assure editorial independence at Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal “Looks Like A 98-Pound Weakling,” as Editor & Publisher’s Mark Fitzgerald writes. It was designed that way. more…
Focusing on the Bridge, Ignoring Latest Whack at Our Liberty
Wired News’ Ryan Singel notes:
Given this Administration’s track record on truthfulness, secrecy and overseas bungling, why is Congress even contemplating giving them more authority to spy on American citizens without even the slightest supervision from the secret and submissive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court?more…
Citizen Media Company Bought by Traditional Media Company
Many citizen media companies will be acquired in coming years by the traditional media operations. The upstarts have most of the best ideas. The incumbents have most of the money, and will for some time longer. Sometimes the upstarts end up beating the big guys. Witness what Michael Bloomberg did to Dow Jones. more…
Citizen Media: A Progress Report
In my keynote at last month’s OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters’ Forum in Seoul, I was asked to offer a year-on-year progress report on the state of citizen journalism. more…
Citizen Media Development in Spain
In country after country, people are trying fascinating experiments in citizen media. One of the pleasures of visiting other places is learning about some of them. more…
About the Backfence Closing
Backfence.com, a pioneering hyperlocal media company, is shutting down. Terry Heaton, pulling together Web commentary on what he calls some important lessons, says: more…
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal
Editor & Publisher’s headline is “Newspaper Legends Fire Away at Murdoch-Dow Jones Editorial Plan,” but it quotes at least one serious journalist saying people shouldn’t assume the worst. more…
A Better Potential Bidder for Dow Jones
NY Times: G.E. and Pearson Are Said to Study Bid for Dow Jones. The General Electric Company, the parent of NBC, and Pearson, the publisher of The Financial Times, are exploring a joint bid for Dow Jones & Company to rival an offer made by the News Corporation, people familiar with the talks said yesterday. more…
Blair on Media, Media on Blair
As it happens, I stopped by the Guardian yesterday while its editor, Alan Rusbridger, was working on this editorial (British papers call editorials “leaders.”). More than most responses to Tony Blair’s sharp-edged speech yesterday, it reflects the reality that the prime minister made some good points amid his brazen hypocrisy. more…
Where Journalism Can Be Heading
I did an op-ed in the Chronicle today. It’s called “Journalism isn’t dying, it’s reviving.”
Prof to Newspaper Readers: Buy Shares in Pubs You Read
Chris Daly has an intriguing idea for Dow Jones and the New York Times Co.: “Readers to the rescue? more…
We’re not dead yet, they’re not journalists yet, says Lucasiewicz
In 2006, Wired called us a “spiraling vortex of ruin.” [Link.] But television is still a $65B business, said Mark Lucasiewicz, VP of Digital Media for NBC said at Editor & Publisher Interactive today in Miami. My reaction: Welcome to the high-tech industry — the Land of the Premature Obituary. more…
News Orgs and Alliances with Bloggers
Dave Winer says in “What is Web 3.0?” that traditional media organizations will make it through their currently tough times by embracing bloggers and other kinds of new media, “without interpretation by professional reporters.” more…
San Francisco Paper Whacks Jobs
SF Chronicle: Chronicle to cut 25% of jobs in newsroom “That’s not just trimming fat, that’s an amputation. That’s losing a limb,” said (Tom) Rosenstiel (director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington), who grew up in the Bay Area. more…
Dow Jones and Bill Gates
About a decade ago, Bill Gates was telling people that Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and other media properties, was a mismanaged brand. He was right then, and Rupert Murdoch is making that point now with his bid for the company. more…
Common Sense that Won’t Be Heeded
On the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the publisher of the largest daily newspaper in Arkansas writes:
One has to wonder how many of the newspaper industry’s current problems are self-inflicted. Take free news. News has become ubiquitous, free, and as a result, a commodity. Anytime you are trying to sell something that becomes a commodity, you have lost much of the value in providing that product or service. more…
Brilliant Choice for NY Times “Public Editor”
Clark Hoyt is the next Public Editor of the New York Times. He’s one of the great journalists of this generation, and I fully expect him to look deeply into the paper’s journalism — with fairness and toughness — in ways that illuminate the journalism of the world’s most important news organization. The Times will be vastly better in the end for this hire. more…
Uh, Oh: Murdoch Wants Dow Jones
Reuters: News Corp. makes $5 billion bid for Dow Jones:
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. offered to buy Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones & Co. Inc. for about $5 billion, but a representative of the publisher’s controlling shareholders said they would vote against the bid. Murdoch, whose $60-a-share bid represents a 65 percent premium to Monday’s closing price, would gain the powerful Wall Street Journal brand ahead of his planned fourth-quarter launch of a business news cable channel.
Ugh. more…
The Not-Yet-Former Audience?
Citmedia friend and contributor J.D. Lasica reported earlier this week from the Web 2.0 Expo . Bill Tancer, general manager of research at HitWise and Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati paired up for a keynote on the state of the “Participatory Web” or “Live Web.” more…
Online Political Pioneer Joins Campaign
At left is Joe Trippi, a political consultant who has joined the presidential campaign of Democrat John Edwards. This is big news in the political world, for several reasons. more…
Newspapers Should Open Archives
One of these days, a newspaper currently charging a premium for access to its article archives will do something bold: It will open the archives to the public – free of charge but with keyword-based advertising at the margins. more…
Virginia Tech: How Media Are Evolving
Once again, horror has given us a glimpse of our media future: simultaneously conversational and distributed, mass and personal. more…
Citizen-Soldier Journalists
Chris Eder, a combat correspondent with the U.S. Air Force, has been pondering citizen media and its application to the military. In “Broadcast This: Leveraging Citizen Journalism in the Air Force,” he dives deep into the topic. (Note: I spent some time with him on the phone and in an email exchange as he was developing his ideas.) more…
Zell and Tribune: A Plundering Operation or Contrarian Buy?
NY Times: For Tribune Buyer, a Storm to the West. The Los Angeles Times was nothing but trouble for the Tribune Company, and it may prove even more of a challenge for its new owner, Samuel Zell.
Zell is a smart, smart businessman. He knows zip, he’s made clear, about newspapers and media. more…
McClatchy-Yahoo Content Deal a Pathbreaker
Howard Weaver, McClatchy’s VP for news, explains in “Foreign correspondence for Yahoo! News” why the deal the companies have made breaks new ground: more…
Citizen Media Directions, Some Video
JD Lasica points to some excerpts from a public conversation he and I had last week in Palo Alto: Citizen media: Where is it heading? more…
German Views on Media Changes
At the Kölner Journalistenschule today in Cologne, Germany, I’ve received a polite but not entirely warm reception in discussing the citizen media shift and its value to the business and economic journalists who are attending this one-day conference. This is not a shock. Germany remains perhaps the most traditional media market in western Europe, and this group is the most traditional of all. more…
Newspaper Columnist Hauls Out “Make ’em Pay” Fix
David Lazarus of the SF Chronicle, in “Pay-to-play is one way to help save newspapers,” says “it’s time for newspapers to start charging for — or at least controlling — use of our products online.” more…
Journalism’s Need for New Models
The Project for Excellence in Journalism has issued its annual State of the News Media report. This year’s identifies seven major trends. (The report calls them new trends even though they are not new, but that’s a quibble.) more…
Economist Magazine Tests “Open System” — With Tom Sawyer Economics
Project Red Stripe is
a small team set up by The Economist Group, the parent company of the eponymous newspaper. Our mission is to develop truly innovative services online. more…
Bloggers as Parasites
Robert Niles, asking rhetorically if blogs are a ‘parasitic’ medium, calls such charges
poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work. And by dismissing blogs as “parasitic,” newspaper journalists make themselves blind to the opportunities that blogging, as well as independent Web publishing in general, offer to both the newspaper industry and newspaper journalists. more…
Clubby Pro Journalism in Sacramento
Capitol Weekly: Out in cyberspace, looking in. For 60 years, the Capitol Correspondents Association has been charged with deciding which reporters should be sanctioned to cover the California Legislature. But a new set of bylaws aimed at restricting the access of partisan bloggers has set off a mini-firestorm within the Capitol, as California aims to become the first state in the nation to set out specific rules over how and whether bloggers should be credentialed. more…
Newspaper Companies’ Woes a Journalistic Boost?
Jack Shafer, in “When bad financial news for newspapers is good news for journalism,” thinks the implosion in stock value of newspaper companies — and newspaper sales for well below what they’d have brought only a few years ago — is
potentially good news for journalism. It pops the bubble that had carried newspaper valuation beyond the Van Allen Belt. And by doing so, it presents publishers—and Wall Street—with more rational expectations about what sort of profits the newspaper industry can make without destroying itself. more…
Reuters Africa: An Advance for Journalism
Big, big news in journalism today:
First, read this press release from Reuters about the launch of its Reuters Africa site. The mission:
to cover Africa in detail and from all angles, to give a wider sense of the issues and their contexts, and to explore the individual countries and cultures. Reuters Africa will target both those living on the continent, and anyone globally who follows African development, investment and news. more…
Defending Journalists from a Newspaper Owner
Take a look at jerryrobertsandfriends.org, created in the wake of the bizarre goings-on at the Santa Barbara (Calif.) News-Press, where the owner has been firing people right and left — and suing journalists who write what she claims are unfair stories about her actions: more…
Wall Street Banker to Newspapers: Abandon Hope?
Steven Rattner, in “Red All Over,” says:
We’ve had experience in the past — the New York City subways come to mind — with businesses that began as conventional, for-profit corporations, and, for one reason or another, were later rendered unprofitable while still being viewed as essential services. It’s time to apply some creative thinking to newspapers and, for that matter, to serious journalism in other media. Then we need to convince Americans that they should pay attention to it — and pay for it.
Managing Harsh Change
IDG executive Colin Crawford, discussing the media company’s transformation, says:
The brutal reality that we’re facing today is the costly process of dismantling and replacing legacy operations and cultures and business models with ones with new and yet to be fully proven business models. However, we face greater risks if we don’t transform our organization and take some chances. more…
Newspaper 2.0
Over the weekend, I attended a day-long workshop in Santa Barbara, California, where several dozen people got together to discuss what organizers called “Newspaper 2.0” — the next version of a venerable, and valuable, part of the traditional media ecosystem. more…
Notoriety as News
In today’s LA Times, media columnist Tim Rutten discusses the Anna Nicole Smith frenzy and its somewhat dismal implications for journalism’s more honorable traditions in a digital era. more…
More Business-Friendly than CNBC? Impossible
It’s not a joke, but you wish it was. CNBC is the ultimate business booster. How could Murdoch’s new plaything be any more so?
more…
Dog Bites Man
When, oh when, will it stop being journalism-business news that a newspaper breaks a story on the Web? The real news would have been if the paper had done anything else with a scoop of this kind. more…
Media Reform: Only for the Left?
I’m at the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, where people from around the U.S. (and in a few cases, from other nations) are talking for three days about how to change American media. Some talented folks are here. more…
2006
One More Reason the Newspaper Business is in Such Trouble
SimplyHeadlines delivers headlines to mobile devices. It’s an obvious and useful tool.
Knight Ridder, the company I used to work for, registered the domain Headlines.com in 1998 — and proceeded to do nothing with it.
more…
Us, not You
It’s fitting, and somewhat overdue, that Time Magazine’s person of the year is “You” — as in all of us.
more…
Department of Not Getting It
The Philadelphia Daily News’ Will Bunch loosely compares Craig Newmark to Lee Harvey Oswald in one of the more bizarre anti-craigslist rants to date from a newspaper guy who understands that advertising revenue is being separated from journalism in the Digital Era.more…
NYT Exec: We’re Keeping the Stock Structure
NY Times: No Stock-Class Shift, Times Co. Chief Says. Janet L. Robinson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, sought to put to rest yesterday any notion that the company might change its dual-class stock structure, a move that could make the company vulnerable to a takeover. “The Ochs-Sulzberger family, which owns approximately 20 percent of the equity of our company — more than any other investor — has no intention of opening our doors to the kind of action that is tearing at the heart of some of the other great journalistic institutions in our country,” Ms. Robinson told analysts. more…
Yahoo’s Partnership with Newspapers
To use an American football analogy, newspapers are starting to behave as though they’re doing the two-minute drill at the end of the game: trying everything in the playbook, and doing it in a hurry. In many ways, it’s about time. more…
Newspapers and their Rich Suitors
David Carr, NY Times: Dubious Mix: Rich Suitors, Ailing Papers. Each potential buyer of the Tribune papers has said, mostly through surrogates, that profits are not the point, but men who spent their lives piling up money hate to watch it evaporate. And any experienced business reporter will tell you the average titan has little understanding or sympathy for aggressive newsgathering. “They say they are not interested in making money and they are not going to interfere in the editorial process, so what exactly is the deal here?” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee University. more…
AP: Daily Circulation Falls at U.S. Papers. Circulation declines accelerated at major U.S. newspapers for the six-month period ending in September, according to figures released Monday, in the latest sign of struggle for an industry that is continually grappling with changing reader habits.
This news is not just bad. It’s the grimmest yet. more…
Whither Investigative Journalism
Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post says “Tightened Belts Could Put Press In a Pinch“:
Real investigative reporting, as opposed to the what-happened-yesterday stuff, is time-consuming, risky and expensive. And as one news organization after another sheds staff in this tough financial climate, it’s worth considering what aggressive journalism has produced lately.
Yes, worth considering. But it’s also worth remembering the Big Media aren’t the only places where aggressive journalism occurs. more…
Blather from the Reader’s ‘Representative’
The ombudsman of the New York Times, in his current column, decides somewhat incoherently, that the paper was wrong to blow the whistle on a semi-secret government spying program targeting, among others, U.S. citizens. more…
Who’ll Cover the News?
We already know who’s covering the city council meetings today. In contemporary American journalism, in most places, it’s not the NY Times and other major dailies. Most likely, it’s nobody. more…
Journalism is becoming a high-tech profession — complete with software licensing
Here at the J-Lab Citizens’ Media Summit, a panel featuring Travis Henry of YourHub, Mary Lou Fulton of the Bakersfield Californian and Bakotopia, and Steve Yelvington of Morris Digital, which launched Bluffton Today. more…
Big Media Getting It, Continued
I’m in a conference room in Washington today with academics, several new-media entrepreneurs and folks from some major media organizations. We are here to discuss the changing nature of journalism, including how to preserve high-quality work while the business model seems to be crumbling. more…
Today’s TV ‘News’
I’ve been sitting in the Atlanta airport for the past several hours in an airline lounge, where the TV is tuned to a “news” network that has been droning on incessantly about a college-cafeteria shooting in Montreal. more…
Can Big Media Feel Shame?
Here’s a fact. While the major media were turning this story into the BIGGEST THING in months, the most widely read people in the blogosphere — while not ignoring the story — were not nearly so preoccupied. more…
Editors Curators?
Craig Newmark is intrigued by the idea of editors as “curators” of new journalism. Sound pretty high-brow, but the concept has some resonance. What happens, though, when the audience collectively does its own selection? Is that mass curator-ship?more…
A Citizen Journalist at Logan Airport
Doc Searls: The Story of a Story. For what it’s worth, I didn’t think of myself as a reporter on the scene, even though, in a literal sense, I was. I thought of myself as a traveler blogging about being where news of some sort was going down, maybe. That’s not journalism as I’ve been taught to think about it over the last 40 years I’ve been doing it. But in a literal sense it was journalism. I was, after all, writing in a journal.
So I think the real story here is a slo-mo one that will go on for years. It’s the story of how journalism became a ordinary practice, rather than an exclusively professional one. more…
Columbia Journalism Dean’s Misguided Move
In his New Yorker piece where he found such inadequacy in citizen journalism, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, wrote, “As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.” more…
Shooting Straw Men, Again, in Journos v Bloggers ‘Debate’
Nicholas Lemann, dean at Columbia University’s journalism school, takes to the pages of the New Yorker to rehash the same old bloggers-v-journalists straw man, contributing practically nothing to this long-tired conversation, though he does come up with some interesting items from journalism history. more…
Bloggers See Selves in Many Roles
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report (260k PDF) on blogging. The organization says, “Blogging is bringing new voices to the online world” — and survey data include these highlights: more…
OhmyNews Forum: A Few Reflections
I’m at the Incheon airport, heading home, after a conference that has, by turn, inspired and amazed me. The OhmyNews Citizen Journalism Forum, which concluded last evening with a dinner in Seoul, brought together people from around the world to share experiences and ideas about their work. more…
CBS Still Doesn’t Get It
The network and its affiliate, at a PR event for the new evening news anchor person (dubbed “Couric’s Twin Cities visit a well-oiled machine” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune), didn’t allow actual reporting and felt threatened by a blogger: more…
Networking Journalism, Pro and Amateur
Jeff Jarvis isn’t happy with the expression “citizen journalism,” and says:
“Networked journalism” takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product. more…
Gawker Media’s Next Act
Nick Denton, in a posting called “Battening down,” faces some financial music as he shakes up his blog titles. By far the most interesting line: more…
Breathtaking Fraud: Now Let’s Get Some Citizen Journalism
NY Times: ‘Breathtaking’ Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid: Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina can now be added this one: it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion.more…
Who Are Those People, Anyway? Us
What traditional media folks need to do is welcome the former audience into the journalism process itself, in addition to celebrating (and pointing to) the best independent work. So far, the activity has been all too limited. more…
Hunger for News Thrives, But Will the News Business?
Slate’s Jack Shafer, in “Newspapers are dying, but the news is thriving,” writes:
Newspapers whose readers are as much constituents as they are readers are the best bets to thrive as they decline. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times will remain musts for a long time. Luckily for the (Washington) Post, it should continue to be required reading for government employees, lawyers, lobbyists, other journalists, and the new-class types at nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and universities. Might one of the Detroit dailies eventually navigate a profitable path out of the decline by focusing more heavily on the auto industry? more…
Will Privately Held Mean Better?
Too few publicly owned newspaper companies have shown the kind of grit to stand up to Wall Street’s demands — and in almost every case they’ve been the ones with two-tiered stock ownership that lets the managers focus on great journalism above great profits. more…
Distributed Journalism Conversation at Pressthink, Bloggercon
Over at his blog, Jay Rosen writes about — in preparation for a session he’s leading next Friday at BloggerCon — “Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism,” saying:
It’s a “put up or shut up” moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like… distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting… and put them to work to break news? more…
News Co-opetition
Amy Gahran, on the Poynter site, asks if competition has outlived its usefulness in news gathering:
Imagine: someday a Pulitzer Prize might be awarded jointly to an enterprise reporting team spread across several news organizations. more…
BBC Head ‘Confident’ but Worried
Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, is the keynote speaker at the International Press Institute’s 2006 World Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland. more…
Stock Option Scandal: Make Shareholders Citizen Journalists
The Wall Street Journal has been leading the way in uncovering yet another corporate scandal: stock-option cheating in which corporate CEOs have apparently been rigging the dates of options grants to give themselves what amounts to free money. Imagine that you could enter a lottery the day after the winning numbers were announced, and you have the general idea of what these people have been doing. more…
Warren Buffett’s Newspaper Dirge
Over at buffalo rising are quotes from the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, at which Warren Buffett said, among other things:
It may be that no one has followed the newspaper business as closely as we have for as long as we have—50 years or more. It’s been interesting to watch newspaper owners and investors resist seeing what’s going on right in front of them. It used to be you couldn’t make a mistake managing a newspaper. It took no management skill—like TV stations. Your nephew could run one. more…
Another Reason Why Big Journalism is in Trouble
The New York Times, at the tail-end of a report about a new editor for Time, notes a more serious transition.:
Donald Barlett and James Steele, two investigative reporters who have chronicled the vicissitudes of the American economy for Time magazine since 1997, have lost their jobs in a budget squeeze. more…
Bringing the Pulitzers into the Web Era
Editor & Publisher: Incoming Pulitzer Chair Steiger Wants More Web In Awards. Paul Steiger, the incoming chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, wants the prestigious awards to delve even more in to Web-based journalism, calling it “the biggest priority for us.” more…
Newspapers and Blogs: Still a Good Idea
Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review asks, “Can newspapers do blogs right?” — and some prominent online journalists offer responses. more…
Missing the Point, Redux
Professional journalism does not gain credibility by casting stones at the bottom-up media, which definitely can use some improvement as it veers into journalism but is not trying — at least not in my view of things — to replace the traditional media. more…
Traditional Media Organizations Involve Audience: Survey Ideas Requested
As noted last Friday, we’re going to look deeply into what traditional news organizations are doing to engage their communities (of interest and/or geography) in the journalism process. Here’s an outline, prepared in large part by Olivia Ma at Harvard University, of how we propose to look at this. more…
Straw Men Versus Citizen Journalists
Freedman’s piece, which appears on the CBS News Public Eye site, raises some fair questions but sinks irrevocably into attacks on straw men, several of which you’ll find in just the single paragraph quoted above. And like so many folks who appear to wish ill for citizen journalism out of hand, he turns the situation into an either-or matter, when the reality is that we’re talking about an ecosystem that can and should support a variety of journalistic endeavors. (As Doc Searls has said so memorably, the logic to adopt is AND, not OR.) more…
Knowledge@Wharton: Are Newspapers Yesterday’s News? To remain competitive in the coming years, these scholars say, daily newspapers will have to strengthen their efforts to attract younger readers, make more imaginative use of the Internet, and develop stories, mostly local in nature, that better meet the needs of readers who have thousands of news and information sources at their fingertips. more…
A Citizen Journalist in Action
The BBC’s Rhod Sharp points me to “Portrait of a flashover,” in which New Orleans resident Gibbons Burke, armed with a digital camera and sound instincts, covers a fire. more…
Judith Miller, ‘Martyr’ to the Web
Slate’s Jack Shafer shreds “Judith Miller’s New Excuse” for her well-deserved comeuppance, in which she blames bloggers for (in her view) unfairly tarring her shabby (my word) journalism in the run-up to the Iraq war. more…
McClatchy Buying (Most of) Knight Ridder
I’m not nostalgic for what many newspapers have become: empty journalistic vessels working mostly for the advertisers and shareholders, only vaguely interested in serving the people of their communities. But when newspapers do their best, they are vital parts of those communities, and we need quality journalism more than ever. more…
Citizen Journalists and a Greedy Telecom Company’s Policy
Tom Evslin: AT&T is Ripping Off American Soldiers. It’s bad enough that they overcharge domestic customers but we have alternatives. The soldiers don’t because, according to The Prepaid Press, AT&T has an EXCLUSIVE contract to put payphones in PXes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, you ask, can’t the soldiers get cheap calling cards to call the US? No! Because AT&T is using (abusing!) its position as monopoly supplier of payphones to block the 800 numbers necessary to use nonAT&T calling cards. more…
Thai-style Citizen Journalism
It has not been reported very well outside Southeast Asia, but Thailand is in political upheaval with protests over Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s sale of Shin Corporation to Singapore’s government investment arm, Temasek Holdings, under dubious terms. People have taken to the streets in protests over the past few weeks calling for his resignation, with some notable citizen journalism efforts applying the pressure. more…
Sports Association’s Attempt to Control the News
News organizations are beginning to fight back against the absurd and arrogant demands of sports leagues and entertainment conglomerates (often the same entities, in my view). As the Honolulu Star Bulletin notes today, it’s not publishing pictures from the pro golfing tournament being held in its backyard. more…
Why We Still Need Big Media
The San Jose Mercury News’ recent series, “Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice,” is a brilliant and powerful demonstration of what Big Media do at the very finest. Rick Tulsky and his colleagues at the Mercury News should be enormously proud of their accomplishment. It should lead to some serious reforms in a criminal justice system that can go so wrong, sometimes ruining the lives of innocent people in a single-minded pursuit of convictions — at the cost of true justice. more…
Q&A About the Center
Mark Glaser, who recently started the “MediaShift” blog for PBS, has posted an interview about this center. Here’s the Q&A portion: more…
The Center’s Mission(s)
As we work to build the Center for Citizen Media in coming weeks and months, we envision three basic missions.
more…
2005
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. more…
A Story that Takes Resources ($$$) to Report
What the newspaper has done here is an example of excellent consumer reporting — a piece that took serious resources, as in money and a willingness to take what undoubtedly will be some serious heat from the markets named here, to accomplish. It’s difficult to imagine how citizen-journalists could pull off the same story in such a credible way. more…
Countering Wal-Mart’s PR Campaign
AP: Wal-Mart Fights Criticism From Labor. Wal-Mart is “good for America” and the barrage of criticism against the company is an effort to protect the status quo in retailing, President and CEO Lee Scott said Tuesday in a sharp attack on organized labor and retail rivals.
It’s not just labor that finds Wal-Mart such a drain on this nation, and it’s not just retail rivals. It’s Wal-Mart’s way of doing business, which has its positive side but in the end harms this nation far more than it helps. more…
A Citizen Journalism Breakthrough
It’s the Buffton Today site and newspaper, in South Carolina — user generated material from the get-go, including free classifieds. It comes from an established media company, and the site looks terrific. more…
A Dying Craft, or a Dying Business?
I now take it for granted that newspapers are trapped — highly profitable businesses that can’t or won’t take the kind of risks that will be crucial to survival. more…
Who’s Investing for the Future? Plenty of Us
The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual media report is online and loaded with fascinating data and conclusions. more…
Madrid: Terrorism, the Internet and Democracy
From the International Summit on Democracy, Security and Terrorism in Madrid, my working group on terrorism and the Internet has come up with what amounts to a set of principles and suggestions. I’ll post them below. more…
Eason Jordan, ‘Off the Record’ and Crisis Management
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. more…
‘Reporter’ Gannon is Gone
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.) more…
Ventura County Paper Gets Message
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. more…
Where Newspapers Can Start the Conversation
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. more…
Newspaper Group Letter Insults Journalism
he president of the National Newspapers Association has written a whiny letter to Wal-Mart. more…
Torture and the Blogosphere
America’s descent into a political, tactical and moral swamp — our use and tacit approval of torture — will someday be seen as a stain on our national honor. (Never mind that it’s basically counterproductive.) Television news’ abandonment of this story will be seen as a stain on a once-serious part of the press. more…
Exclusives are Fun, Too
Kevin Marks gives me more credit than I deserve in this Many to Many posting, where he notes the traditional journalistic model of going for an exclusive scoop. He says some journalists are thinking how to make stories more inclusive: “measuring success by how many people they bring into the conversation, and they recognise it doesn’t necessarily start with them.” more…
Distributed Journalism’s Future
In a posting yesterday about how bloggers helped keep the pressure on U.S. House Republicans to reconsider an ethical issue, I mentioned the way two bloggers convinced average citizens to call their members of Congress and ask how they’d voted on the issue (it was a secret ballot). The inquiring citizens then let one of the bloggers know, and he posted the running results of the tally. more…
Newspaper Sold, Gutting Begins?
Some newspaper companies have made a habit of cutting staffs to the bone and basically milking the cash cow while they could. The days when that will work may be coming to an end. Readers notice this stuff, and now they have genuine news choices. more…
DeLay Rule Overturned: Bloggers’ Symbiosis with Mainstream Media
NY Times: House G.O.P. Voids Rule It Adopted Shielding Leader. Stung by criticism that they were lowering ethical standards, House Republicans on Monday night reversed a rule change that would have allowed a party leader to retain his position even if indicted. Lawmakers and House officials said Republicans, meeting behind the closed doors of the House chamber, had acted at the request of the House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay, who had been the intended beneficiary of the rule change. more…