NY Times: Two German Killers Demanding Anonymity Sue Wikipedia’s Parent. Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber became infamous for killing a German actor in 1990. Now they are suing to force Wikipedia to forget them.

The legal fight pits German privacy law against the American First Amendment. German courts allow the suppression of a criminal’s name in news accounts once he has paid his debt to society, noted Alexander H. Stopp, the lawyer for the two men, who are now out of prison.

Old laws are inadequate to new eras and technologies, and political boundaries have limited meaning in a networked world.

The German law balanced the rights of those who’d served their time against public knowledge, and came down, by any American First Amendment standard, absurdly far on the wrong side. But it is well-meaning, and was written in a time when it was possible to control what media did within a political jurisdiction, at least for widespread public attention, not in a time when anyone can publish for a global audience.

The networked-world element of the case is a reminder of an ongoing problem in the Digital Age. It’s bad enough that the Germans have such a law, but it’s their country. What’s clearly over the top is trying to pull this information from the English version. The Wikimedia Foundation has rightly refused. (This reminds me to make a donation to the project.)

I worry that the German lawyers — and authorities — will escalate. Even though Wikimedia has no assets in Germany, I’d be unsurprised if the case finds its way into American courts, for no other purpose than forcing the foundation to spend money defending itself. That’s a punishment in its own right.

And suppose the German lawyers persuade courts there to order the arrest of Wikimedia Foundation employees should they visit the country. This isn’t probable, no doubt, but if I were on the board I’d keep a close eye on the risks of stopping in Germany even to change planes.

The broader lessons are part of the changing nature of communications — and of changing norms. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jennifer Grannick addresses the former, in context of this case, in this way:

At stake is the integrity of history itself. If all publications have to abide by the censorship laws of any and every jurisdiction just because they are accessible over the global internet, then we will not be able to believe what we read, whether about Falun Gong (censored by China), the Thai king (censored under lèse majesté) or German murders.

We’ll be fighting these fights for decades to come. People who would control what others can read (listen to, view, etc.) — in order to control what they think and, ultimately, do — will not stop trying to have such powers. (Reminder to self: Send EFF a donation, too.)

But the deeper, harder issue is changing norms, because we have to ask ourselves if we truly want permanent records of everything we’ve ever done — and if there’s no choice in that matter whether we want people only to know us for the worst of our actions, not the sum of ourselves.

The German murders, Werlé and Lauber, don’t get much sympathy in this regard. Nor should they: Murder strikes me as the central act of these men’s lives, though we should also note that they have paid the debt to their society that entitles them to re-enter that society with some respect from others, difficult as that may be. Do they really expect, however, that even a ban on publishing their names will expunge their deeds from people’s knowledge? Yet the motive behind the German law is a sound one: to help those who’ve transgressed restore their membership in society.

As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, job seekers are trying to get minor criminal offenses fully expunged from court records and online databases, especially ones where plea agreements promised such nullifying of the record. We are apparently so unforgiving as a society that even an arrest at some point in your life can be a job disqualification, even if you were totally innocent or if the charge was absurdly petty.

Here’s the problem. Databases will keep this stuff around, and on a Web where duplication is the nature of the system, there will ultimately be no way to fully get rid of anything — or at least we won’t be able to rely on its disappearance, whether through the obscurity of printed records in dusty courthouse basements or actual destruction of records as promised.

Which comes back to changing norms. Until we start weighing old acts against the totality of someone’s experiences and deeds, we’ll hold a sword over each others’ head. Is this really the way we want to live?

Update: I’ve adjusted the title and the intro here to clarify quick, one-time publishing versus just quick publishing (something not exclusive to the collection below).

There may be times when you need to publish something fast and you only want to publish once. Rather than start up a whole new blog, you may want to check out the following tools:

If you have text and images, I’ve found three good sites for immediate publishing. They all do basically the same task. After submitting your content, you’re given a published page with a link for sharing. All three involve this two-step process, but vary slightly in features and community offerings.

CopyTaste features a rich text editor that allows for embedding images and video. Of similar sites, this is most notable difference. Pages can be shared and rated by the community or they can be made private. CopyTaste also offers a plugin for Internet Explorer, which allows the user to make a page out of any copied text.

Dinkypage bills itself as your place for “disposable” web pages. However, this refers to the investment involved rather than the page’s longevity (pages don’t come with a deletion date). Dinkypage’s nice feature is the ability to edit the URL. A user can choose what come’s after http://dinkypage.com/. One drawback is that images and video cannot be embedded and must be linked from another source.

PasteHTML is by far the most stripped down of the three. One can enter HTML or text and that’s about it. It’s the simple option if you’d rather not interact with a GUI.

File2.ws is excellent if you have a file you’d like publish. The content of the uploaded files is published on a new page and is accompanied by a download link. Text files and PDFs will display their content, while MP3s and video will feature a player. It supports a full range of file types.

Moomeo is an interesting option if you’d like to publish an email,. Sending an email to Moomeo’s address will publish that email to a unique page. Community commentary is an interesting feature and the ability to publish without ever visiting the page is also nice.

This is Jeremy Iggers, founder of the Twin Cities Daily Planet, a journalism organization that works with citizens and pro journalists. He’s speaking at a meeting of the Kettering Foundation.

The video was created from a MyTouch phone, and was streamed “almost live” — the only delay was 3G network latency — as he spoke. Qik, the service I used, has an Android (and I believe iPhone) app that turned the phone into a video-news device and inserted a geo-tag (from the GPS in the phone) to the location.

This kind of thing is becoming easier to do, and getting more sophisticated on the client and server sides. I’m working with students on several experiments, and an application that may be relevant.

(Note: Google has loaned me the phone, among a bunch of phones it’s given to my school for online media experiments. T-Mobile has provided service for the phones other than this one, which is my personal account.)

Mark Briggs summarizes what we’re doing here in a blog post. Mark is author of the excellent book Journalism 2.0, and is on the verge of publishing a new and very updated version.

UPDATED

In the minutes and hours after an Army officer opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, last week, the media floodgates opened in a now-standard way. A torrent of news reports and commentary poured from the scene, the immediate community and the Pentagon, amplified by corollary data, informed commentary and rank speculation from journalists, bloggers, podcasters, Tweeters, texters and more.

Also standard in this age of fast news was the quality of the early information: utterly unreliable, and mostly wrong. The shooter was dead; no he wasn’t. There were two accomplices; no there weren’t. And so on. (See Greg Marx’s “Jumping to Confusion” at CJR, and Glenn Greenwald’s “media orgy” post at Salon.)

This was not, as several critics have claimed, a failure of citizen journalism. (That the most prominent such accusation came from a web-news operation that is notorious for its rumor-mongering and fact-challenged ways is too rich for words, and definitely not going to draw a link from me.) There was plenty of bullshit to go around that day, at all levels of media. Lots of people quoted President Obama’s admonition (watch the video) to wait for the facts, but almost no one followed it. And almost no one will heed Army Gen. George William Casey Jr.’s advice on Sunday, to not jump to conclusions “based on little snippets of information that come out.”

Like many other people who’ve been burned by believing too quickly, I’ve learned to put almost all of what journalists call “breaking news” into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, “interesting if true.” That is, even though I gobble up “the latest” from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it’s unreliable if not false.

It’s my own version of “slow news” — an expression I first heard on Friday, coined by my friend Ethan Zuckerman in a wonderful riff off the slow-food movement. We were at a Berkman Center for Internet & Society retreat in suburban Boston, in a group discussion of ways to improve the quality of what we know when we have so many sources from which to choose at every minute of the day.

One of society’s recently adopted cliches is the “24-hour news cycle” — the recognition that the once-a-day, manufacturing-based version of journalism has essentially passed into history for those who consume and create news via digital systems. Now, it’s said, we get news every hour of every day, and media creators work tirelessly to fill those hours with new stuff.

(UPDATE: Yes, I am aware that some print publications can, though few do, provide actual perspective. As several commenters have noted, meanwhile, the notion of slowing things down to achieve more perspective has been in the wild for a while now, though aimed more at the journalists; note Paul Bradshaw’s “slow journalism” observation; Kirk Ross’ ideas and this from Matt Thompson. What I’m suggesting, as noted, is much more about audiences. See update at end.)

That 24-hour news cycle needs further adjustment. The first is that an hourly news cycle is itself too long. The latest can come at any minute in an era of TV police chases, Twitter and twitchy audiences. Call it the 1,440 minute news cycle.

Rapid-fire news is about speed, which has two main purposes for the provider. The first is human competitiveness, the desire to be first. In journalism newsrooms, scoops are a coin of the realm.

The second imperative is audience. Being first draws a crowd. Crowds can be turned into influence, money or both. Witness cable news channels’ desperate hunt for “the latest” when big events are under way, even though the latest is so often the rankest garbage.

This applies not just to raw information (often wrong, remember) that’s the basis for breaking news. It’s also the case, for example, for the blogger who offers up the first sensible-sounding commentary that puts the “news” into perspective. The winners in the online commentary derby — which is just as competitive, though for lower financial stakes, as — are the quick and deft writers who tell us what it means. That they’re often basing these perspectives on lies or well-meaning falsehoods seems to matter less than being early to comment.

I’m not arguing here against human nature. We all want to know what’s going on, and the bigger the calamity the more we want to know. Nothing is going to change that, and nothing should.

Nor is this a new phenomenon. Speculation has passed for journalism in all media eras. Every commercial plane crash, for example, is followed by days (now more like minutes and hours) of brazen guessing by so-called experts who, to be sure, are occasionally proved correct after months of actual investigation by the real experts. Sometimes we never know the truth.

But the advent of 1,440 minute news cycle (should we call it the 86,400 second news cycle?), which brings with it an insatiable appetite for something new to talk about, should literally give us pause. Again and again, we’ve seen that initial assumptions can be grossly untrustworthy.

We all know that the Texas shooter wasn’t killed during his rampage, as was first reported. That’s because the story was still fresh enough, and the saturation coverage was ongoing, when it emerged that he hadn’t been shot dead by law enforcement.

But we all “know” things that were subsequently found to be untrue, in part because journalists typically don’t report outcomes with the same passion and play that they report the initial news. We’ve all seen videos of people who’ve been arrested but who were later acquitted; yet the inherent bias in crime reporting has left reputations of innocent people shattered. And how many of us hear a report that such-and-such product or behavior has been found to raise cancer risk, but never hear the follow up that the report is either false or misleading?

The rapid-fire news system’s abundance of falsehoods has other causes than simple speed, including the decline of what’s supposed to be a staple of journalism: fact checking before running with a story.

Citing the grotesque “balloon boy” stunt, Clay Shirky (also a friend) observed recently — in a Tweet, no less — that “fact-checking is way down, and after-the-fact checking is way WAY up.”

I’m not entirely sure the balloon-boy situation is the best example of this phenomenon, because there weren’t all that many facts journalists could check during the time the balloon was in the air. The family’s publicly weird ways should have prompted much more skepticism, earlier than it did, but journalists went with the story in front of them.

Clay’s point is absolutely right in a general sense, however. It lends weight to slow news, to the idea that we all might be wise to think before we react, just as most of us failed to do during the early hours and days of the “#amazonfail” situation last April. As he wrote then, a lot of us were wrong and believed things that turned out not to be true — and we reacted with fury to something that was a mistake, not evil design. (I am one of those people.)

I rely in large part on gut instincts when I make big decisions, but my gut only gives me good advice when I’ve immersed myself in the facts about things that are important. This applies, more than ever, to news, where we need to be skeptical of just about everything we read, listen to and watch, though not equally skeptical.

A corollary to that is increasingly clear: to wait a bit, for evidence that is persuasive, before deciding what’s true and what’s not.

It comes down to this: The faster the news accelerates, the slower I’m inclined to believe anything I hear — and the harder I look for the coverage that pulls together the most facts with the most clarity about what’s known and what’s speculation.

Call it slow news. Call it critical thinking. Call it anything you want. Give some thought to adopting it for at least some of your media consumption, and creation.

UPDATE (and welcome to the BoingBoing crew): I shouldn’t have to say this, but several tweets have suggested that the answer is, uh, print and quality broadcasting. Newspapers and magazines and network news.

Of course this is true, in part. I cherish the New Yorker magazine (among others), and the dwindling number of daily newspapers and broadcasters that try to do this part of their jobs properly. To the extent that audiences decide this matters to them, maybe they’ll pick up some old habits.

But this isn’t about saving the old guard, and it really isn’t even about fixing (some of) what’s wrong with journalism. It’s mostly about persuading audiences to, among other things, “take a deep breath” before leaping to conclusions, as PaidContent’s Staci Kramer tweeted. (I don’t trust journalists to do this anymore, with too few exceptions.)

In a practical sense, we can help it along if we find ways to preserve a happy by-product of the manufacturing process. Or, as Clay puts it in an email, “the idea — that we have to get back, by design, the kinds of things we used to get as side-effects of the environment — is so important right now, and especially for news.”

Ethan Zuckerman also replied on his blog in a post called “Why we fall for fast news” — as always, great insight. Excerpt:

Why do we persistently refresh news, looking for updates? (See my comments on AP’s ethnography of news consumption, which suggests that this is a common pattern.) It makes sense for certain types of news – if you’re directly impacted by an event, tracking a storm enroute to your town, for instance. But that’s not why we refresh most news – it’s rare that having the most timely (and, as Dan suggests, the least careful) information has a direct impact on our well-being.

Here are a couple of possibilities:

- The media made us do it. We don’t want to eat fast food, but that’s all we’re fed, due to the newsroom factors Dan suggests.

- We’re bored. AP’s “deep dive” suggests that relentless refreshing is something we do mostly when we’ve got nothing better to do.

- We’re building social capital. If we’ve got the most up-to-date information on the breaking news, we can use it to open conversations with friends and position ourselves as in the know, raising our stature.

- We’re narrative junkies. A breaking news story is like a novel that ends after a few chapters – we keep reloading in the hopes that someone will tell us the rest of the story.

I suspect there’s some truth to each of those explanations… and I suspect that each is badly incomplete. I also suspect that figuring out what drives our patterns of news consumption, and our susceptibility to fast, often-wrong news is critical for Dan’s slow-news movement to gain momentum.

Rupert Murdoch’s influence on the Wall Street Journal has not been the disaster many feared it would be when News Corp., the company he controls, bought Dow Jones several years ago. In many ways, the paper has actually improved.

The worry was that Murdoch would do what he’s done at almost every other media property he controls: Turn the journalism toward political ends. The Journal’s editorial page has been an entirely predictable arm of the American political right for some time now. Would that infect the news columns as well?

It appears that this is indeed happening. That’s the significance — assuming this is not a one-time case of an editor going overboard — of a news story in yesterday’s paper, which carried the headline, State Death Taxes Are the Latest Worry and began this way:

With the federal estate tax disappearing for most people, state death taxes have emerged as a surprise new worry.

This is not neutral language. Nor is it accurate. It’s a deliberate perversion of language to make a political point; dead people do not pay taxes. Their estates and heirs do.

(The people who oppose estate/inheritance taxes have a variety of arguments against the practice. I side with Bill Gates Sr., Warren Buffett, several Rockefellers and lots of other people who believe the arguments against the tax are specious and, more than that, dangerous to the nation’s future should massive, untaxed transfers of wealth to people who haven’t earned a dime of it become the law of the land.)

The Journal’s editorial page has called the estate tax a “death tax” for years, in keeping with its wealth-equals-good stance on just about all issues. Moving this language to the news pages is a sign that the newspaper is taking on a more overt world view — a view that takes its lead from the truth-be-damned ideologues on the editorial page.

I don’t mind that the Journal is doing this, though I suspect more than a few of the journalists who write for the paper must be having major qualms. In fact, it strikes me as healthy that the paper is showing its world view in such a deliberate way.

There are risks for News Corp. in taking this stance, not least a repeat of the self-marginalization that Fox “News” has chosen with its incessant BS, to the point that no one who cares about honest journalism has much respect for the channel. Fox has thrown away any reputation it might have had for being even remotely interested in contrary facts, because even its supposed straight news reporting so often takes a political stance and the lies of the commentators are so astonishingly in-your-face.

The greater risk, in the short run, is whether the Journal’s journalists will let themselves be turned into propagandists. This need not be the case.

The Telegraph in London has a right-of-center view of the world, proudly so, even in its news pages. But its journalism is generally excellent, rarely (from my reading, at any rate) propaganda.

I’m all for the Wall Street Journal turning itself into an American equivalent of the Telegraph: a responsible news organization with a transparent world view. But should the Journal turn itself into a newspaper/Web version of its Fox TV channel, it will be making a fatal mistake in the long run.