Mediactive

I’ve been a fan of Salon since the day it started, and a paying subscriber as long as the company has offered that option. If you visit Salon often, you already know why.

So I’m delighted to be bringing some of my blogging there, including many of the items I’d normally be posting here. My arrangement with Salon gives them exclusive access for one week to new posts, after which they’ll appear here — as always, under a Creative Commons license from this site.

Here’s my first post.

David Carr, media columnist for the New York Times, took critical note this week of arrogant behavior at Apple. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the myopia that pervades his organization about its own dealings with Apple, he missed a crucial part of the story.

Carr, whom I like and respect enormously, gets so much right. He connects some dots that his and other news organizations, particularly Wired, had been creating in their journalism — and not just about the outrageous invasion of a journalist’s home, plus the confiscation of his computing gear, to further an almost certainly Apple-inspired investigation. This, you’ll recall, occurred after an employee lost an iPhone prototype, which was then purchased by Gawker in the process of doing a much talked-about article.

(Whether Gawker Media was right or wrong to pay for the device isn’t the topic here; I don’t have to like the way they did their journalism to vehemently object to the abuses by the authorities, who should have gotten a subpoena instead of a search warrant; their actions were an attack on journalism, a flagrant one.)

The dots Carr connects amount to what anyone who’s paid attention to Apple has known for years: Apple makes great gadgets and software, but it is secretive, manipulative and capricious in the way it deals with everyone outside its high walls — and it plainly aims to exert absolute control over what it aims to make the world’s next major computing and communications platform.

Communications means media. Carr notices, at one point, that Apple is becoming a media company as he cites Apple’s dictatorial handling of the ecosystem that uses the iPhone operating system, which controls the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Carr can’t find a pattern in the way Apple decides which content-based apps get approved and rejected. I can: It’s a pattern of a single company making all the decisions. Carr does say it makes him “queasy” and notes that it’s part of a closed-ecosystem method Apple has chosen for its newer devices. He writes:

Apple’s behavior and choices in the Gizmodo affair threaten to interrupt the séance between the company and an adoring press, who have looked past all the frantic secrecy and reverently stared in wonder at what was eventually revealed behind the curtain.

The media’s crush on Apple has always been an unrequited love affair. The company has a few familiars in the press whom it favors, but Apple has “no comment” programmed on a macro key. The company has unsuccessfully sued bloggers who, it believed, had punctured its veil of secrecy, and important tech news organizations like Wired have been shut out as a result of coverage deemed ill-mannered.

When I read that, I thought, Aha, now he’s going to address his own organization’s flagrant questions of integrity involving Apple — and look at an issue I and a number of others have raised about Apple and journalism. Namely: Why are news organizations, creating iPad apps at a rapid rate, throwing themselves into the arms of a company that unilaterally reserves the right to reject or remove the journalism from its platform if it doesn’t like what it sees.

Surely this would be worth raising an eyebrow? You won’t find a word in Carr’s column even wondering if journalism organizations are violating basic principles this way.

The questions are (or should be) more pointed in the specific case of the Times and its dealings with Apple. Their relationship looks so close on the surface that it gives the appearance of a cross-promotional campaign for each others’ products. Might it have been useful for Carr to ask his own bosses to address any of this? When I asked, they stonewalled until issuing a “no comment” to my specific questions. This was curious: Last summer, when Apple was similarly promoting the Times in its pre-release campaign for an iPhone model, a Times spokesperson specifically denied to the Nieman Journalism Lab that there was any business relationship, saying Apple had asked for permission, happily granted, to feature the news organization in its promotion. In that context, a “no comment” is at least an interesting shift in position. Maybe Carr could have asked if something had changed?

That’s a rhetorical question, of course, just like the other ones I’m asking about how far Carr’s column took these issues. I don’t really expect him to push his bosses as hard as I’m suggesting he might. He’s an employee, and employees of news organizations — institutions whose arrogance matches that of Wall Street banks — know just how far they can go, which isn’t very far, in asking of themselves that which they demand of others.

UPDATED

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.

UPDATED

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.

UPDATED

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.

UPDATED

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.

UPDATED

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 »

Politico, the website devoted to all things political, almost certainly got pwned by scam artists Friday when it posted an unverified memo — a probable hoax — about health care. It’s an embarrassment for journalists who fall for fakery, but these kinds of things do happen.

What doesn’t usually happen is how Politico dealt with its inadequate journalism. And the case brought back memories of another, more significant mess: the “Rathergate” affair of 2004; more on that below.

It’s obvious, if you read the non mea culpa posted by Political’s White House editor, Craig Gordon, that his organization didn’t check the memo’s authenticity before putting it online, and only pulled it down after Democrats complained. But instead simply apologizing forthrightly, he basically said a) Politico now couldn’t verify anything about the memo’s authenticity; b) but it seemed real (as if that’s an excuse; c) and besides, the Democrats were probably doing what the memo said they were doing anyway.

Then comes his conclusion, a howler for a journalist:

“In the end, POLITICO followed an old rule-of-thumb in journalism in taking down the memo: when in doubt, leave it out. By day’s end, it was still impossible to tell exactly what’s the real story behind the memo. But in the next few months, when Democrats try to pass a multi-billion-dollar ‘doc fix,’ maybe that will shed a little light on the Democrats’ real intentions.”

Except that “leave it out” is not synonymous with “publish it and then take it down if we learn later that we can’t verify its authenticity” — or is this the news standard for news organizations boasting a co-founder who serves on the Pulitzer Prize governing board?

The standard Politico has applied here, is, of course, “truthiness”: Because they want it to be true, it’s close enough.

To be more fair to Politico than the publication may deserve, the memo seemed to many others like something some Democratic aide, somewhere in Washington, might have written, perhaps as a draft. This helps explain why so many journalists took the bait and became part of the vast spin machine that so defines our nation’s political press.

As Talking Points Memo’s Christina Bellantoni reports, the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder had the honor to apologize for posting without checking. The Hill, a publication with apparently more traditional principles, got the memo but decided not to run it at all.

Remember, just a few years ago the journalism and political worlds went appropriately berserk when CBS’ 60 Minutes II team ran a story about George W. Bush’s “service” in the Air National Guard. The report was based, in part on memoranda that CBS not only couldn’t prove were authentic but which were at best highly questionable as to their authenticity. The journalism was awful; CBS and its people took a deserved hit to their reputations. Sadly — and I use that word partly because the journalists involved had long and outstanding records for doing great work — the people who made the mistakes held fast to the notion that they’d done nothing wrong.

It’s obvious, based on the verifiable record, that Bush got strings pulled to avoid Vietnam service and then all but ducked out on his duty. And it may turn out that some Democrat’s fingerprints are on the health care memo. In both cases, the journalism was lacking, and the journalists’ response even more so.

Politico is widely considered a new gold standard of political reporting. That worries me.

Nora Young hosts CBC Radio’s “Spark” program, and we chatted the other day about Apple and its controlling ways.

John Darnton is a good novelist, and was a superb journalist in a long career at the New York Times. Now he’s curator of the Polk Awards, one of only a couple of journalism prizes that means anything. (Journalists have a tedious tendency to give themselves prizes, more so than any other business I can name.)

The Polk awards have been ahead of the game in recent years. Two, notably, have recognized that journalism has moved squarely into the Digital Age, even though most of the kinds of journalism achievements that win big prizes — notably investigative reports — continue to be done by organizations willing to spend serious money and devote serious time to the efforts.

The first pathbreaker, which falls into the category of organization-based media that happens to live on the web in this case, went to Josh Marshall and his team at Talking Points Memo in 2007. The one making waves this year, and the more relevant here, went to the still-anonymous person who captured the video images of the death Neda Agha-Soltan in the Iranian election protests early last year.

Darnton, interviewed by Mediaite, an online publication, offered left-handed compliments to the Neda video — making it entirely clear that he doesn’t really believe average people (as opposed to journalists with years of experience) have much to offer beyond bystander status. From the column by Willard C. Rappleye Jr.:

“(Darnton) does take umbrage, though, against the term ‘citizen journalist.’ ‘If you’re walking down the street and somebody collapses in front of you and somebody else runs over and administers CPR because they happen to know it, and saves the victim, you wouldn’t go home and say you saw somebody saved by a citizen doctor. You’d say you saw someone saved by a bystander who happened to know CPR. Right? ‘Same thing here. I like to call them bystanders — not journalists. Just good bystanders.’”

I’ve long since stopped taking umbrage when people don’t get it. But to hear stuff like this from someone with Darnton’s track record is dismaying.

He clearly does not understand — or if he does, he deeply regrets — that journalism is no longer the province of the people like himself, who rose on well defined career tracks through a business that was comprised mostly of big monopoly organizations or a few members of an oligopoly, businesses that achieved their economic power due to conditions that no longer apply.

He does not get that journalism is an ecosystem, and that it is becoming more diverse over time.

The regular people who capture important videos and pictures — or who blog authortitatively what they’ve seen, etc. etc. etc. — are not journalists. But they have committed acts of journalism, profoundly important acts of journalism. That is their role — or more accurately one of their roles — in the ecosystem, and it’s becoming at least as important as any other role including the one played by the people who do it for a living or for a few freelance dollars.

Just as reporter shield laws (assuming we should have them) should protect journalism, not the people who are accredited or licensed to be journalists, in these awards — and in everyday life — it is the act of journalism we should be celebrating.

Darnton’s instincts are sound. And his wish to recognize the values of great journalism is absolutely correct. But I hope he’ll expand his field of vision. And I hope he’ll join those of us who are working on ways to help those people he relegates to bystander roles become even more active and knowledgeable participants in the journalism sphere.

Citizens who commit acts of journalism: Instead of semi-sneers, they deserve our support in every possible way.