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The New York Times, after noting that Apple reversed its arbitrary banning of an editorial cartoonist’s iPhone app, reports that an association representing cartoonists is lobbying for the company to change its rules for humorous, politically charged apps..

I think we need a cartoon for this. It would show the cartoonists storming the gates at Infinite Loop in Cupertino, with the editors and reporters at their newspapers nowhere in sight as they refuse, almost universally, to address the larger issue of turning over their journalism to a capricious owner of an ecosystem in which they have no control.

Maybe Mark Fiore could create it. He knows the issue intimately.

UPDATE: Or maybe not. As Molly Wood notes, Fiore “resubmitted his app, which is now ‘accepted.’ I wish he’d told Apple to shove off.” Me, too.

Interesting juxtaposition on the Wall Street Journal homepage a minute ago:

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A few days ago, following up on questions I’ve asked a number of other news organizations about their relationships with Apple, the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro put a query to his bosses — and, unlike me with any traditional news company (including his), got an answer.

Here’s the operative quote from his story today, entitled “App rejected? There’s a rule for that” –

So, can Apple remove news organizations’ apps for their content? Washington Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti wrote that “this is our understanding”; National Public Radio’s Danielle Deabler agreed but said NPR saw no evidence that Apple wanted to do such a thing. Publicists for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and USA Today declined to comment or did not reply to e-mails.

We now have confirmation from two of America’s most respected news organizations — the Post and NPR — that they willingly participate in a distribution/access ecosystem where the company that owns it can remove their journalism from that system for any reason it chooses.

I suspect that the spokeswomen for the Post and NPR have technically violated the terms of their companies’ developers agreements with Apple even by saying that much. Which is, of course, part of the problem.

Anyway, kudos to Pegoraro, who has shown more spine than his colleagues at other news organizations. From all appearances, they’re just hoping this will all go away. It won’t.

UPDATE: At the International Symposium on Online Journalism today in Austin, I asked three panelists — from NPR, the New York Times and the Guardian — about this issue. Only NPR’s Kinsey Wilson responded, and he was more forthright than I’ve heard anyone be from any media company so far.

The situation is “not ideal,” he acknowledged. No news organization, he assumes, has the individual leverage with Apple to insist on contract terms that should be standard for people who believe in their journalism.

NPR, based on Wilson’s other panel comments, is creating what sounds like a multi-platform strategy: creating a back-end system that can feed to any platform. All smart news organizations are trying to move this way.

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Eleven days after I first raised the subject of the New York Times’ complicated relationship(s) with Apple (follow-up here), I’ve finally received an answer, of sorts. Sadly, the answer wasn’t to the questions I asked.

A PR person from the company, responding to one of several subsequent emails, wrote back today: “No, we are not going to comment.”

This stonewalling — this deliberate statement that the newspaper chooses to be opaque on matters that go to its editorial integrity — is disappointing, but unfortunately not entirely surprising. But it left me with no real choice on a decision I truly hate to make:

I’ve sold my small (300 shares) holding of New York Times Co. stock. I’ll be taking a loss on the transaction, but I’d never expected to make much money, if any, on my purchase in the first place; I bought NYT stock because I wanted to demonstrate my support of quality journalism.

For decades I’ve revered the New York Times. I still believe that it’s loaded with superb journalists. I hope it survives and thrives in a media environment that grows more challenging every day.

Journalism is in enough trouble as it is, and the Times’ challenges are truly daunting. Arrogant non-transparency about basic integrity only makes the situation worse. So I’ll put what money I have left from this already poor investment into something else.

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It’s been more than a week since I asked a number of news organizations, chiefly the New York Times, to answer a few questions about their relationships with Apple. Specifically, I asked the Times to discuss what has become at least the appearance of a conflict of interest: Apple’s incessant promotion of the newspaper in pictures of its new iPad and highlighting of the Times’ plans to make the iPad a key platform for the news organization’s journalism, combined with the paper’s relentlessly positive coverage of the device in news columns.

In addition, I asked the Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today — following up on a February posting when I asked why news organizations were running into the arms of a control-freakish company — to respond to a simple question: Can Apple unilaterally disable their iPad apps if Apple decides, for any reason, that it doesn’t like the content they’re distributing? Apple has done this with many other companies’ apps and holds absolute power over what appears and doesn’t appear via its app system.

Who responded? No one. Not even a “No comment.” This is disappointing if (sadly) usurprising, but in light of other news this week it’s downright wrong.

UPDATE: A Times PR person emailed, 11 days after I first contacted the company about this, that the paper is “not going to comment.” Still no word from the others or, more recently, the Washington Post.

Yesterday, Nieman Journalism Lab’s Laura McGann had a story that should give pause even to Apple’s biggest fanboys and girls inside the news industry. In a post entitled “Mark Fiore can win a Pulitzer Prize, but he can’t get his iPhone cartoon app past Apple’s satire police,” she wrote of the newly minted Pulitzer winner in the cartooning category:

In December, Apple rejected his iPhone app, NewsToons, because, as Apple put it, his satire ‘ridicules public figures,’ a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, which bars any apps whose content in ‘Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.’

My disdain for Apple’s tactics grows with almost week — and I’ll be saying more about that in a separate posting — but Apple isn’t the issue here. This is about journalism integrity, and the absolute lack of transparency America’s top news organizations are demonstrating by blowing off a totally reasonable question that these news people refuse to raise in their own pages to any serious degree. (The Times’ refusal to discuss its wider relationship with Apple is even more discouraging, and I’m getting close to selling my small stock holding to demonstrate my disgust with an organization I once absolutely revered.)

I was glad to see Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum pursue this yesterday when he wrote, “It’s Time for the Press to Push Back Against Apple.” Will anyone? The early signs aren’t encouraging.

In a Tweet today, Publish2‘s Scott Karp asked, “Do you think news orgs should refuse to create apps for iPad/iPhone?” It’s the right question.

The answer is a qualified no. While I won’t personally want to participate as a journalist in an ecosystem where one company controls content in this way, I can understand why others might — but any self-respecting journalist would want to have absolute, in-writing guarantees that Apple could not in any way interfere with the journalism.

I see no sign of this. And I’m disgusted with journalists who participate in this system or ignore its implications, or both.

I’ve had my issues with ProPublica in the past, and haven’t changed my mind on what I said back then.

But the organization, as I also have said, is doing brilliant work — and I don’t mean solely the great stuff by Sheri Fink that won a Pulitzer Prize today and was a finalist for another.

Last week, ProPublica and NPR released a report that everyone should read and listen to. It exposed some of slimest financial dealings known to date about the financial bubble that nearly brought down the global economy: in this case, a hedge fund’s working both sides of a street in ways should make you sick, and absolutely furious.

Kudos to all. This is journalism at its finest.

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Recent days have reminded me of the many traits Apple and the New York Times share. Both are the best at what they do in certain domains. Each is emphatically elitist, and, in varying ways, self-confident to the point of arrogance. Neither is very transparent (though at least the Times has its Public Editor).

The differences, of course, are profound. In particular, there’s the business trajectory: Apple has reinvented itself several times, and lately has gone from triumph to triumph as a profit-making company. The Times Co.’s record in this regard is deeply mixed: Reinvention has come mostly at the edges, and the business has been heading downhill.

The affinities between Apple and the Times came into sharper focus in the past several weeks, but in ways that have raised some difficult and as-yet unanswered questions. Some background:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ars Technica: Court: FCC had no right to sanction Comcast for P2P blocking. The FCC’s decision to sanction Comcast for its 2007 P2P blocking was overruled today by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. The question before the court was whether the FCC had the legal authority to ‘regulate an Internet service provider’s network management practice.’ According to a three-judge panel, ‘the Commission has failed to make that showing’ and the FCC’s order against Comcast is tossed.

We’re in scary territory, but it’s not a big surprise that we are.

Comcast and the other carriers will be emboldened to continue what they’ve started: the subjugation of America’s broadband future to their interests and those of their entertainment industry partners and subsidiaries. Our second-class status in broadband will soon be even worse if they get what they want: turning the Internet to a television-on-steroids system where control is in the middle, where the edges of the networks — that is you and me — do what the center tells us we may do.

The cable and phone companies have built networks from the favored position of having been government-granted monopolies. They are an effective duopoly — wireless providers can’t provide the same bandwidth and they are trapped by the oligopoly (carrier owned, to a major extent) in the backbone networks — and they are going to use it for their benefit, not ours.

This isn’t just a free-speech issue at its core. It also raises some basic economic questions; America lags further and further behind the rest of the developed world in taking advantage of broadband’s potential, and the consequences of our inaction grow more serious every year.

While I’m skeptical of all of the specific network-neutrality fixes I’ve seen so far — unintended consequences worry me — I’m absolutely freaked out at the trend. We are turning over our fundamental rights to communicate and collaborate to companies that have not earned even a semblance of trust.

The FCC’s incoherent policy-making is only partly the issue here. More important is the refusal of Congress to do its job. If only that was surprising.

Network neutrality has always been the kind of issue requiring serious engagement from the lawmakers. As they do so often, they’ve ducked and dodged, leaving it to regulators to make vital policy decisions.

Will Congress wake up? And even if it does, given our pay-to-play lawmaking environment these days, will it do the right thing? My doubts keep growing, on both counts.

When in the field, you can be limited by computers you don’t control. Limitations can be as simple as a library computer without Adobe Reader installed or as complex as a third-world internet cafe where the machines have few applications and none in your language. A USB drive pre-loaded with your own software is a simple workaround, but I haven’t yet run across a collection of portable software packaged especially for the field journalist.

To meet this need, I’ve gathered a range of portable applications one can run from a USB drive. This is version 1 and will develop based on use and suggestions. I chose the initial set with this criteria in mind:

• Meet the needs of media consumption or creation
• Open-source or freeware
• Familiarity and ease (when possible)

The how-to for setting up your own USB drive is below, but first, let me list the applications:

Platform:
PortableApps Platform – PortableApps.com offers an extremely useful foundation for portable software. It sets up your USB drive (or even an iPod) for installing and running other portable applications. It runs on Windows, but can be run on Linux and OSX via Wine. I started with the platform alone without other applications added. However, you can download the platform with lots of extras as well.
Consumption:
Firefox – Other browsers can be portable as well, but I chose Firefox for its universality.
Universal Viewer – This very handy app can view most document and image types and easily covers the doc, pdf and odt bases.
VLC Media Player – VLC plays both audio files and most video formats.
Creation:
Audacity – This covers simple audio editing.
GIMP – This image editor is an open-source alternative to Photoshop.
Inkscape – This vector image editor is a simple alternative to Illustrator.
KompoZer – Though not as robust as Dreamweaver, this web editor covers a lot of bases.
Notepad++ – This is a text editor that can also highlight code. It’s useful for quick edits to HTML and CSS files.
FileZilla – This is an open-source FTP client.
VirtualDub – I’m still sifting through portable video-editing options, but this one should suffice for now. Codec installations in general make adding a portable video editor a bit more involved.
Utilities:
Skype – Other IM clients are available as well. Skype offers voice and is well-saturated.
Eraser – A simple privacy utility for ensuring documents erased on a public machine are gone for good.

How to Set Up Your Field Journalist USB Drive:

1. You’ll need a USB drive. It doesn’t have to be extremely roomy for applications as the total install of the programs listed here only comes to 258 MB (give or take). However, you’ll want to have room for any files you’ll be working with, so extra gigs doesn’t hurt.
2. Download the PortableApps platform. Once downloaded, run the  file. It will ask for an install location. Here, choose the drive letter of your USB drive.
3. Once installed, PortableApps should launch. If not, view the files on your USB drive and double-click “StartPortableApps.”
4. Installing applications is fairly simple, though not immediately intuitive. You first need to download the application you want to install and the files can be found at the links in the list above. There are two ways to install depending on whether the application is customized for the PortableApps platform or not. Both are simple:
   
   To install an app customized for the Portable apps platform, go to “Options” and then to “Install a  New App.” Then, just select the file. Note: Files for the Portable Apps platform will carry the .PAF extension.
   
   To install any other portable app, first download and uncompress the file. This will usually yield a file folder with that application’s name. Take this folder and copy it into the PortableApps folder on your USB drive. After this, go back to the PortableApps program, select “Options” and “Refresh App Icons.” Your new application should now appear.
5. Your USB drive is now ready for digesting, managing and editing a range of media. If you want to customize, more portable applications can be found at PortableApps and Softpedia.

This is just the first version and I’m still exploring portable applications. I’m very interested in suggestions for applications you prefer to those on this initial list or programs that fill other gaps. If you know of similar projects for journalistic purposes, I’m very interested in that as well.

Photo via DavidRGilson’s Flickr stream.