Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee posted this announcement on Usenet (the main Internet forums of the day). The key line:

“The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere.”

Berners-Lee didn’t just give this to the world. He deliberately declined to patent this work, because he wanted wide adoption of his invention and believed in a culture of open, not closed.

We are all in his debt.

Note: Mediactive was published several weeks ago in Japan by Asahi, a major publisher there. For that edition I wrote a new chapter, which we called Chapter 0. Here it is. (I’ll be adding links soon.)

On March 25, 2011, the mayor of Minamisoma, Japan, recorded an 11-minute video entitled “SOS from Mayor of Minami Soma City, next to the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, Japan.” Visibly exhausted and distraught, Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai reported that his community, nearly ruined by the triple disasters of the massive March 11 earthquake and tsunami plus dangerous radiation from the damaged Fukushima reactors, was isolated and running out of time.

Mayor Sakurai didn’t send the video to Japanese officials in Tokyo, or to NHK, the nation’s biggest broadcaster. He posted it on YouTube — aiming his message at anyone who might listen. Many heard, and helped. “Suddenly, the world was extending its hand to us,” he later told the New York Times. “We learned we’re not alone.”

The same day the mayor was making his video, The Hindu, a newspaper in India, reported that American diplomats in New Delhi believed Indian support for a United Nations resolution critical of Israel was an attempt to “curry favor” with Muslim nations. The newspaper’s information regarding the US views came from sources that, unusually in diplomatic circles,  were not anonymous. The information came, albeit indirectly, from the diplomats themselves.

But this was not a case of deliberately public statecraft. Like many other media organizations around the globe, The Hindu had relied on documents from a new kind of media organization: WikiLeaks. For months, traditional journalists had been reporting on diplomatic cables from United States State Department that had found their way into the hands of WikiLeaks, which in turn was making them available to the media and the public. The Indian disclosures were only the latest in a phenomenon that has had a major impact on the media, not just diplomacy.

Just weeks later, as American military forces located and killed Osama Bin Laden, Sohaib Athar posted a series of Twitter “tweets” from his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In the early hours of May 2, he reported what he was seeing and hearing as helicopters hovered over what turned out to be the compound where Bin Laden had been hiding. Althar’s first-hand account became a piece of the media coverage, an essential one in many ways.

When I completed Mediactive in the fall of 2010, the WikiLeaks “Cable-Gate” story hadn’t yet broken. The Higashi-Nihon Dai-Shinsai disasters, and the death of Bin Laden, were still months away. Yet in the spring of 2011, as I write this new chapter for the Japanese edition of the book, it is clear that they had something in common.

They pointed to a dramatic shift in the way we interact with media. They reflect some of the challenges – and opportunities – we all face in making sense of our world.

I’ve spent years as a participant in the media world, and from my perspective the media elements of these events are harbingers of our shared journalistic future. In this new chapter in the Japanese edition of Mediactive, I want to talk about them in that context.

As Clay Shirky just pointed out in his Foreword, one of my main goals here is to upgrade all of us as media users. As I’ll also explain in my Introduction, coming up after this chapter, I don’t expect you to spend the kind of time that I devote to media analysis. Think of what follows here as a way to help set the scene for understanding the challenges, and taking advantage of the opportunities.

Disaster and a Human Response

No event in history has been so thoroughly documented as Japan’s triple disaster in early 2011. No event has sparked a greater outpouring of media, from individuals as well as journalism organizations. The wealth of information available to the public may have been unprecedented (though even so, there was insufficient data about radiation levels at and near the crippled nuclear plant). We also had ways to make sense of it all, or at least begin to sort it out. The most essential tool, of course, was common sense.

In the hours and days after the disasters, I spent a great deal of time watching the English translation of NHK World, where announcers and reporters provided calm and thorough coverage of the events. (My wife, who is Japanese, was watching the original streaming feed.) The contrast with the shrill drama on American cable-television news channels was dramatic – and a reminder of the role that quality journalism can play in our chaotic world. In a break from its own tradition, HNK had allowed streaming video of its broadcast to be carried around the world on the Internet. In the process, the broadcaster won legions of new fans among people who wanted to learn more.

Joi Ito, a Japanese entrepreneur who was named director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in April 2011, told me that video played a huge role in the aftermath of the disasters. Not only were there hundreds of citizen-captured videos from the scene, but the decision by NHK to stream its programming — especially government press conferences, which traditionally have been open only to members of Japan’s journalism elite — was also a pivotal shift for the broadcaster. During the state of emergency, said Ito, who is a friend, the Internet turned out to be the most reliable mechanism for receiving information, and this gave NHK a much larger audience inside the country, not just outside. He also noted that newspapers pulled down their “paywalls” during the peak of the crisis, because they, too, understood that the public’s need for information amid an national catastrophe outweighed other considerations.

What Japanese media companies had in common, he said, was that they were reacting in the pressure of a situation with no real precedent, and for which they had no pre-arranged plan to put into action. “When you don’t have a plan, you can be ad hoc and agile,” he said. “It can work better.”

Meanwhile, media companies and Japanese citizens in the stricken areas were finding an ally in Google, which created a Person Finder Web application that became an essential part of the crisis infrastructure as part of a Crisis Response resource page. At the same time, the open-source Ushahidi project software became a vital conduit for aid and government workers. Ushahidi’s “Crisis Map” project has origins in the Haiti earthquake, and brings together reports from affected areas with people who can assess the quality of the information.

The flow of information from people in the affected areas to those who could help became not just part of the aid effort, but also the media itself. During those early days after the disasters, many people also spent a great deal of time following an ad-hoc collection of sources. For me, these sources included Twitter feeds from people on the ground in Japan, and from others who were aggregating what they considered the best English-language information they could find, much of which was related more to the constantly shifting nuclear issues than the staggering loss of life from the natural disaster.

From Twitter feeds – and on Facebook pages and a variety of blogs by people I knew or people whose work had been recommended to me by people I trusted – I was sent to other text messages plus photos and videos that brought the multiple disasters into sharper focus. I watched horrific videos taken by brave people who kept their mobile-phone cameras running even as the water rose closer and closer to the high places where they’d taken refuge, and watched as the water and debris swept away entire neighborhoods. The sheer volume of data was stunning, a vast increase over the amount we’d seen from the last major tsunami to hit Asia in 2005, when tourists in South Asia captured videos of destruction there.

My new media sources also pointed me to helpful information from knowledgeable people and organizations that were following the events in Japan. One was the MIT nuclear engineering department, that explained in plain language how the threats to safety and health were developing in the Fukushima reactors, and what might yet occur.

As happens more and more in the evolving media ecosystem, an interplay developed between the old and new. In one remarkable case, Ito and other Japanese-speaking bloggers helped slow the spread of dramatic misinformation. On March 16, as Ito reported in his blog, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said there had been a jump in radiation at Reactor 3 and that TEPCO staff were being relocated to “a 安全な地域 or ‘a safe region’.” Ito wrote:

The foreign press misunderstood this and started reporting that the TEPCO staff had evacuated the reactor causing a broad panic. Hiroko Tabuchi of the New York Times  contacted the Nuclear Industry Safety Agency and TEPCO directly to clarify and confirmed that they had not in fact been evacuated, but just moved temporarily to a safer area inside the plant during the spike. Jun Seita then reported that as of 11:30AM, NHK was reporting that the staff were back to work.

The frustrating thing was that once this corrosive and sensational misinformation was in the main stream media via the wires, it was very hard to get them to fix it. Al Jazeera was the first that I saw to edit their news story to reflect that indeed they had not been evacuated.

Some observers of Japanese media believe—a view shared by many around the world—that breaking news is becoming the province of social media and other online media creation. I don’t believe we should make that judgment, at least not quite yet. Yes, Twitter users were first to report the death of Osama Bin Laden in early May, 2011,  but Twitter users have also been first to report the deaths of people who weren’t actually dead.

Moreover, as Ito notes, Japanese media organizations didn’t sustain their ad-hoc innovations once the immediate crises abated. NHK stopped live-streaming, for example. “The minute people stop paying attention,” he said, “the old patterns start to kick in.”

But the earthquake and its aftermath plainly did shake up Japan’s view of itself and its media, as well as the rest of the world’s view of Japan. We on the outside saw a nation that was suffering but holding to its legendary self-discipline and manners, a nation that — far more than Americans, for example, could ever imagine in themselves — refused to allow these staggering disasters to bring a wider collapse.

WikiLeaks and Transparency

Even as the events in Japan unfolded, the media world was embroiled over an emerging power in journalism: WikiLeaks. The now-famed site, run by Australian-born Julian Assange, had become much more than a source of newsworthy documents leaked by anonymous whistleblowers. It had, in many ways, become a central example of how the journalism ecosystem was evolving.

In the winter of 2011, the WikiLeaks debate centered around a trove of documents from the U.S. State Department, such as the ones discussed by The Hindu newspaper. These documents were leaked diplomatic cables from American diplomatic personnel stationed around the world.

But the WikiLeaks story had begun years earlier. After its founding in 2006, WikiLeaks said its mission was to put a spotlight on unethical acts by powerful people in business and government. Among its early targets were politicians in Kenya and Peru; banks in Switzerland and the United Kingdom; and Scientology.

It was in 2010 that WikiLeaks became a globally recognized name. That April, the organization released documents and videos documenting American activities in the Iraq War, including a video of a 2007 shooting of journalists and Iraqi civilians, most unarmed, from a U.S. helicopter. American officials were furious, and WikiLeaks soared in search rankings.

In July 2010, a breakthrough occurred when WikiLeaks became a partner with several major media organizations: the New York Times in the United States, the Guardian in the United Kingdom and Der Spiegel in Germany. They reported on what became known as the Afghanistan War Diaries, a trove of documents leaked from the US military about operations in the war there. The power of the stories was apparent quickly, and could be measured in part by the fury of the American government at what was being disclosed.

The meaning of WikiLeaks was starting to become apparent. If information existed in digital form, it could find its way to the world if a single person with access to that information wanted to make it public. One observer who grasped the impact of that reality was Daniel Ellsberg, who’d given the famous “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times back in the early 1970s. He said what happened with WikiLeaks was comparable — and said if was contemplating the same decision now, he’d just scan the documents and put them online.

The partnership with media organizations was a major shift for WikiLeaks. Assange had concluded that simply posting documents wasn’t enough. While media were and are becoming democratized, there was still the matter of getting people’s attention beyond a small circle of those who care deeply about any given topic. In a profile about him in the New Yorker magazine, Assange had lamented the general disinterest he perceived among journalists when it came to huge stories when everyone had the same information; if everyone knew, it wasn’t as big a story. But when a few selected journalists at major institutions get the information first, then it becomes bigger news. (This says more about journalists’ competitive instincts and their response to “exclusives” than it did about their willingness to actually do their jobs for their audiences.)

Even though the Iraq material had become a minor sensation, Assange wanted what WikiLeaks was disclosing to have more impact, so he took what he had to major media organizations. This was symbiosis, far from the traditional relationship of a source to a journalist.

Now WikiLeaks’ role was broader: source, intermediary, publisher, P.R. agent and more. Others have done some of these things at the same time, but the size and importance of Afghanistan story elevated the shifting changes in media to new levels. This was true, in part, because of the nature of WikiLeaks itself. This “stateless news organization,” as New York University Professor Jay Rosen elegantly put it, was subverting many media assumptions of the past.

Part of the uproar over WikiLeaks was what the Afghanistan documents contained: the names of some local citizens who’d cooperated with anti-Taliban forces and who might be in danger of retaliation. The New York Times took huge care in what it printed, and kept some of the material out of its own reports at the request of the Obama administration. WikiLeaks also held back some of the documents, but it came under withering attack for what it disclosed despite the fact that no U.S. official was able to point to any Afghan who suffered any retaliation.

Then, in November 2010, came the State Department cables. The Obama administration and governments around the world were furious. It is clear, based on newspaper reports, that the Obama administration is seeking to move forward with some kind of prosecution based on the WikiLeaks disclosures. But at the time of this writing, it is not clear who, if anyone, will be charged with a crime.

Some American politicians called for prosecution of Assange under an old espionage law that makes it illegal to leak secret information (and quite possibly to publish it), but which has not been used to prosecute a journalist. This raised an obvious issue: If WikiLeaks people could be charged with such crimes, why wouldn’t the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and many other U.S. news organizations also be vulnerable, given their frequent reliance on secret documents? If WikiLeaks – surely a media organization by any standard – is open to prosecution, why isn’t Bob Woodward, the famous correspondent from the Washington Post who has made a career of publishing secret documents.

Journalism organizations have learned some lessons from WikiLeaks, too. One is the need to be open to leaks in new ways. In May 2011 the Wall Street Journal launched a project called site called SafeHouse. The pitch to users:

• Help The Wall Street Journal uncover fraud, abuse and other wrongdoing.
• Send documents to us using a special system built to be secure.
• Keep your identity anonymous or confidential, if needed.

Unfortunately, SafeHouse was not secure, nor necessarily confidential, in its initial phase. Security experts found major flaws. And the site’s Terms of Service gave the newspaper “the right to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities or to a requesting third party, without notice, in order to comply with any applicable laws and/or requests under legal process, to operate our systems properly, to protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies, and to safeguard the interests of others.”

The Journal was working to fix the security issues. Whether it can repair the trust it lost with a flawed launch was much less certain. But the project, and others like it that other news organizations and advocacy groups are sure to be launching, tells us a great deal about the impact of WikiLeaks, and what it means in the long run.

When more than a few people have access to newsworthy digital information, it is increasingly likely to reach the public eye. For public officials and corporations  — and maybe, in the end, for all of us – this has alarming aspects. But it is a reality we cannot ignore.

Bin Laden and Media Change

My wife and I had just finished watching a video of “The Social Network” on the evening of May 1. Routinely, we checked the news online before getting ready for sleep — and learned that America had finally caught up with Osama bin Laden. Like every other American for whom Sept. 11, 2001 is seared into memory, I had a sense of relief and quiet satisfaction that this epic murderer hadn’t died of old age in some sanctuary.

I also thought back, as I watched a streaming broadcast of BBC News on my computer, to the event that made Bin Laden a household name around the world: the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington. And I reflected on the continuing evolution in news over the past decade — accelerating changes in the ways we experience and participate in the flow of news and information in a digital age.

What’s changed most since 2001 are the spread of wireless data communications and the rise of robust social networks, but the outlines of where we were headed were clear even then. The 9/11 attacks brought emerging possibilities fully to the surface, as I wrote in my 2004 book We the Media:

By the turn of the new century, the key building blocks of emergent, grassroots journalism were in place. The Web was already a place where established news organizations and newcomers were plying an old trade in updated ways, but the tools were making it easier for anyone to participate. We needed a catalyst to show how far we’d come. On September 11, 2001, we got that catalyst in a terrible way.

I was in South Africa. The news came to me and four other people in a van, on the way to an airport, via a mobile phone. Our driver’s wife called from Johannesburg, where she was watching TV, to say a plane had apparently hit the World Trade Center. She called again to say another plane had hit the other tower, and yet again to report the attack on the Pentagon. We arrived at the Port Elizabeth airport in time to watch, live and in horror, as the towers disintegrated.

Had I been there in 2011, we would have received more than a phone call. We’d have been pulling information from the Internet via a mobile device that could provide everything from voice to Web pages to video. And we’d have been checking  our social media feeds.

For plenty of people in 2011, the news of bin Laden’s death did arrive via Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, rumors spread widely on Twitter before President Obama’s official announcement, and got wide credence when an aide to former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tweeted, “So I’m told by a reputable person that they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.” His source was correct, as it turned out, but we should keep in mind that Twitter users have also been the first to report the “news” that someone died when, in fact, that person was alive. On May 1 and 2, Twitter served a different function for me: It became a value-adding system once the basic facts were known. I relied, as I increasingly do in breaking news events, on the people I follow there to provide links to the best coverage from traditional media, as well as links to a variety of other sources.

The best traditional media organizations, including newspapers, did their jobs in the usual way as the bin Laden story became the story of the day. They covered the immediate news and added perspective.

That part was reminiscent of 2001, but only to a point:

The next day our party of journalists, which the Freedom Forum, a journalism foundation, had brought to Africa to give talks and workshops about journalism and the Internet, flew to Lusaka, Zambia. The BBC and CNN’s international edition were on the hotel television. The local newspapers ran consider able news about the attacks, but they were more preoccupied with an upcoming election, charges of corruption, and other news that was simply more relevant to them at the moment.

What I could not do in those initial days was read my news paper, the San Jose Mercury News, or the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, or any of the other papers I normally scanned each morning at home. I could barely get to their web sites because the Net connection to Zambia was slow and trans-Atlantic data traffic was over whelming as people everywhere went online for more information, or simply to talk with each other.

Today, we no longer subscribe to those newspapers (apart from the New York Times and a local paper on Sundays), because we get most of our newspaper journalism online. The reason is that broadband has become much more widespread and robust, even though it’s lagging in the U.S. compared to the rest of the developed world. The fiber backbones are reaching everywhere now.

[In 2001] I could retrieve my email, however, and my inbox over flowed with useful news from Dave Farber, one of the new breed of editors.

Then a telecommunications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Farber had a mailing list called “Interesting People”30 that he’d run since the mid-1980s. Most of what he sent out had first been sent to him by correspondents he knew from around the nation and the world. If they saw something they thought he’d find interesting, they sent it along, and Farber relayed a portion of what he received, sometimes with his own commentary. In the wake of the attacks, his correspondents’ perspectives on issues ranging from national-security issues to critiques of religion became essential reading for their breadth and depth. Farber told me later he’d gone into overdrive, because this event obliged him to do so.

“I consider myself an editor in a real sense,” Farber explained. “This is a funny form of new newspaper, where the Net is sort of my wire service. My job is to decide what goes out and what doesn’t…Even though I don’t edit in the sense of real editing, I make the choices.”

Dave Farber still makes these choices on the IP list. It’s still a must-read source of news and wisdom for me and the legions of people who continue to follow this particular wire service.

The value of this service — we now tend to call it “curation” and “aggregation” — wasn’t as clear a decade ago as it is today, however. We are overwhelmed with information today, vastly more so than in 2001. As I discuss in Mediactive, one of our most pressing issues is how we deal with that flood of data. Dave Farber was and remains an excellent curator and aggregator. The people I follow on Twitter, especially in special lists I’ve created for people I consider experts in specific fields, are created another valuable space for curation and aggregation.

One of the emails Farber sent [in 2001], dated September 12, still stands out for me. It was an email from an unidentified sender who wrote: “SPOT infrared satellite image of Manhattan, acquired on September 11 at 11:55 AM ET. Image may be freely reproduced with ‘CNES/SPOT Image 2001’ copyright attribution.” A web address, linking to the photo, followed. The picture showed an ugly brown-black cloud of dust and debris hanging over much of lower Manhattan. The image stayed with me.

Here was context.

Our ability to see the world in visual ways has expanded. It took almost no time for the Net to tell us about the various satellite images from Pakistan, showing the bin Laden compound and its surroundings.

Back in America [in 2001], members of the then nascent weblog community had discovered the power of their publishing tool. They offered abundant links to articles from large and small news organizations, domestic and foreign. New York City bloggers posted personal views of what they’d seen, with photographs, providing more information and context to what the major media was providing.

“I’m okay. Everyone I know is okay,” Amy Phillips wrote September 11 on her blog, “The 50 Minute Hour.”31 A Brooklyn blogger named Gus wrote: “The wind just changed direction and now I know what a burning city smells like. It has the smell of burning plastic. It comes with acrid brown skies with jet fighters flying above them. The stuff I’m seeing on teevee is like some sort of bad Japanese Godzilla movie, with less convincing special effects. Then I’m outside, seeing it with my naked eyes.”

If Twitter and Facebook took on more of this function in 2011, that reflected the immediacy –  the ease of use and especially the social context — of these new services, which didn’t even exist in 2001.

For all the value of these social networks, they represent a step back in some respects. As I note elsewhere in Mediactive, Facebook and Twitter are private companies with their own agendas. While they are superbly engineered tools that provide users fantastic capabilities, what we put into those services is, in the end, owned by those services. Our words and pictures and videos are only part of what we put in; the social connections are even more important, and we don’t own those when we live in others’ universes.

We would have had a much different media experience a decade ago if AOL or Microsoft had succeeded in what they were trying to do in the 1990s: Make our online experience a universal walled garden. Facebook, more so than Twitter, aims to be precisely that in this new era. If we allow that to happen, we will literally be turning over a significant part of our history to a private company that operates in its own best interests, not ours.

The promise of the Internet was flowering in 2001. We saw only the possibilities and the immense freedom of this emerging sphere for communications and collaboration.

The vision we shared then is in some real jeopardy today. Governments and private companies scheme to wrest control from us at the edges of the networks and pull it back into the center, where it manifestly should not belong. They may win.

A decade from now, we’ll surely experience another major event with newer media we cannot even imagine today. I hope we’ll be using tools that renew the Internet’s promise — technologies and policies that honor a simple notion, of genuine freedom to learn, create and collaborate.

That’s the name of a new book from O’Reilly. The title is absolutely true, as I can attest.

The Economist asked me (part of its “future of news” series) what I thought the impact of the News Corp. voicemail hacking case would be. The link goes to my reply, which I’m cross-posting it here (and on Google+):

Over at the Economist magazine, I’m contributing to a discussion about where journalism is heading.

In the days ahead — and especially after New York prosecutors drop their increasingly pathetic case against former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as they surely will — you’ll see some media coverage of journalism’s role in this debacle. There will be a few notes about how everyone rushed to judgment.

But almost no one will be asking more basic questions about the way journalists go about their business in criminal cases. You will see little or no self-reflection about the way reporters work in concert with law enforcement in almost all such cases, in ways that are designed by the police and prosecutors to stack the deck against the accused.

It starts with the “perp walk” — the parading of the accused before cameras. Try this thought experiment. Imagine you’ve been arrested, and have spent a night in a filthy jail cell, getting maybe an hour of sleep in the clothes you were wearing the day before. Or, perhaps, you’ve been told to put on an orange jump suit that prisoners wear. Either way, now you’re shackled and frog-walked into a van that takes you to the courthouse. Then you’re manhandled out of the van and are frog-walked through a gauntlet of cameras and shouting reporters.

How do you imagine you’d look, whether or not you were innocent? You’d look guilty as hell, because the perp walk is designed to make you look guilty. (For more on perp walks, see this piece from the Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins.)

The deck-stacking extends to the charges themselves. Charges are only accusations; they are not proof. Yet they are repeated verbatim by reporters in ways that make them sound like “this is what happened,” and putting “alleged” into the story doesn’t change that perception.

Then comes the tendency journalists to get on-the-record (can be published) material from people who refuse to attach their names to what they’re saying, often from law enforcement sources who are, again, working hard to ensure that any potential juror will assume guilt. I mentioned an example of this several weeks ago: a reprehensible story describing supposed details about what the alleged victim in the Strauss-Kahn case had told police and co-workers.

Look. I don’t know what happened in that hotel suite. Only two people know. One of them has an alleged record in France of being promiscuous and pushy with women (stories I tend to believe, in part because some of the women have gone public). The other, we have learned, has lied repeatedly to police and prosecutors, according to on-the-record statements from law enforcement people — though even now the anonymous sources continue to have a field day in supposedly responsible media outlets.

What’s blatantly obvious, based on what is known for sure, is that the woman is not a credible witness. Period. It is certainly possible that she was sexually assaulted in that suite. But “possible” is light-years away from the level of proof needed to send another person to jail for what would likely be the rest of his life.

What seems to have escaped most of the journalists covering this case, from the very beginning, is the same thing that the media ignore in almost all criminal cases: an actual presumption of innocence. If we believed in the presumption of innocence, we wouldn’t collaborate with the prosecutors and police on perp walks. We wouldn’t let ourselves be used to seed a presumption of guilt into the jury pool.

The defense you’ll hear is simple, and sounds compelling: The fact is that the most of the people arrested and prosecuted are in fact guilty. Law enforcement almost always operates in good faith, to get the bad guys.

But there are well-documented cases of bad faith. And even the best police and prosecutors make mistakes. That’s why a presumption of innocence is so essential — and why it’s shameful that journalists persist in mocking it.

In the New York pages of today’s New York Times you’ll find a terrific story about a Cuban bicyclist named Damian Lopez Alfonso, who hasn’t let his handicaps (no arms) stop him from becoming a competitive racer. As the Times style requires, the story refers to him as Mr. Alfonso.

Had this story appeared in another logical location — the sports pages — the “Mr.” would have been removed. This is also a requirement of the Times’ style guide.

The Times mandates courtesy titles (Mr., Ms., etc.) only in news stories, though it drops them for some dead people and those it arbitrarily considers evil enough not to deserve them. For example, Osama Bin Laden lost his Mr. after US forces killed him in May. But Saddam Hussein was recently still being called Mr. Hussein, as Slate notes.

Entertainers get honorifics in the Times, so you’ll read stories about the Rolling Stones you’ll see references to Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards. (The Times reviewer of this Meat Loaf concert apparently couldn’t bring himself to writing the laugh-out-loud “Mr. Loaf,” and just used “Meat Loaf” throughout.)

Athletes — at least those deemed newsworthy by the Times — are entertainers, too. The make lots of money. They take lots of drugs. They get arrested. Oh, they perform. But no honorifics for them.

The Wall Street Journal used to be consistent. But in a recent move that was semi-lampooned even by its own columnist, it opted to drop the honorifics for stories in the sports section. The logic for the move? None, apart from the notion that it somehow sounded better, or at least less ridiculous, to just go with last names.

These policies aren’t just inconsistent. They’re incoherent.

They’re also a quaint vestige of a dying era, when the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the vanishingly small number of other papers that do this actually believed they were showing respect for the people they covered. (Except for supremely evil people and athletes, who obviously deserve none.) Did the papers self-enforced civility (except for athletes and people deemed supremely evil) may actually have had an impact on the journalists’ work, or on the perception of the newspapers that had this policy?

But respect is in short enough supply in our society. There’s nothing wrong with honorifics, if they’re used consistently. The incoherent policies at the Times and Journal don’t demonstrate respect for the people they cover when they deliberately omit courtesy titles for a single class of people in specific pages; rather, they demonstrate disrespect.

So many things are disappointing about the FCC’s just-released future of media report that it’s tempting to write it off entirely. That would be a mistake.

Shallowness in research isn’t one of the problems. No one can accuse the working group (PDF), headed by Steve Waldman and 18 months in the making, of not doing some serious homework, with interviews, hearings and data collection.

A few traditional news organizations were favored with embargoed copies of the report ahead of time (Exhibit A of the problem), though after reading their articles I’m not sure if they did much more than skim it. In any event, my quick comments here — I hope to do more later on — are based on a fast read-through of the report, which bizarrely appears to be available on the FCC website only as a collection of PDFs, with no HTML version (Exhibit B). Happily, lots of folks, including Josh Stearns from the media reform organization Free Press, have posted it as an embeddable a Scribd document.

My initial reaction, as suggested at the top, is puzzlement at the working group’s missed opportunities.

The report’s main takeaway, from what I can see, is that local news is declining. That’s true, in part. No one can dispute the massive disinvestment in journalism by local newspapers and broadcasters in recent years. The rise of hyperlocal news has helped fill some gaps, but there’s no question that fewer paid journalists — at least ones working for organizations that try to provide news to the general public — are paying attention to local and state governments than before.

The report largely stays away from what many observers, including me, had feared. It does not ask for major government intervention in news. Whew. At the hearing where I spoke, more than a few people wanted just that kind of recommendation.

But there’s a caveat: It suggests steering what could ultimately be more than $1 billion in annual federal advertising spending (for such things as military recruitment) away from big media organizations to smaller, local ones. The can of worms this will open is fairly large, not least the political favoritism that is certain to pick winners in such a process. I guarantee, if this goes anywhere, that the dollars will flow to the companies that have the most clout on K Street, not the new media organizations that are doing the hardest work now to fill the gaps.

The report’s subtitle, “The changing media landscape in a broadband age,” highlights my biggest disappointment — its lack of serious recommendations regarding the real and growing broadband problem in the U.S. The authors insist that “Universal broadband and an open Internet are essential prerequisites for ensuring that the new media landscape serves communities well,” but their recommendations are utterly vague on how we can get there.

In Mediactive, I wrote that only one major government intervention makes sense:

only one that wouldn’t put government meddling squarely into the practice of journalism—an inevitable result of the direct subsidies being pushed by well-meaning but misguided media thinkers. It’s a subsidy for bandwidth: getting true broadband Internet access to as many people as possible, as some other nations in Europe and Asia have done.

The precedent in this case is the right one. Taxpayer-assisted infrastructure—especially the postal system and low rates for sending publications—helped create the newspaper business, and enabled a lot of other commerce. Let’s bring that logic forward to the early 21st century, and enable high-speed Internet access for all Americans, and a communications infrastructure for all competitors.

I’m not surprised that this idea went nowhere, just disappointed.

From what I can tell, the report gives short shrift to network neutrality, or rules guaranteeing users’ rights to select the media they want, not the media to which the broadband providers and their commercial partners want to give priority. The suggestion that new wireless services will solve the problem by adding competition is at best wishful thinking.

Maybe the working group is just recognizing reality. America’s leaders have made it clear that they do not consider it a taxpayer issue to ensure broadband access; they’ve stood by while the U.S. slides dramatically in world rankings of the most-connected nations. And they’ve increasingly shown hostility to the vital need for rules to ensure that average citizens, not corporate America, can make their own decisions. The journalism ecosystem of the future utterly depends on connectivity and net neutrality. Paying lip service to these notions doesn’t help.

You don’t have to be a supporter of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund chief who’s been charged with sex crimes in New York City, to be appalled at some of the journalism about this case. Sadly, you can find a prime example on the website of the normally high-minded Center for Public Integrity, a totally damning piece by John Solomon based on lurid new allegations from two unnamed sources “familiar with the investigation.”

The sources insisted on anonymity, Solomon reports, “because of the ongoing investigation….” What in the world does that mean? Nothing: It’s an empty non-excuse for refusing to stand behind their own words.

Here’s my take. These sources are almost certainly in law enforcement. I believe they are almost certainly trying to solidify the public perception of Strauss-Kahn as a criminal scumbag, and do this so thoroughly that almost anyone serving on any jury will come into the trial with a predisposition to find him guilty — and that his defense lawyers, knowing that this is the case, will go with a plea bargain.

I don’t doubt that Solomon has reported faithfully what he was told. That doesn’t make any of it true. Nor do I doubt that Solomon and his editors trust these sources. There’s no reason why you should, since they won’t stand behind their own words.

I’m no fan of Strauss-Kahn, nor of the French media’s habit of glossing over ugly behavior among the people — almost all men — who rule government and business. He may well have done this crime. But I’m sticking with innocent until proved guilty.

I’ve been a longtime fan of, and have contributed to, the Center for Public Integrity. That won’t change. But as I’ve said privately to a friend in the organization, I believe this piece was way below the center’s standards.

I’m writing an occasional online column for the Guardian, one of the great English-language media organizations. The latest piece, “The Web’s Weakest Links,” implores creators of online content to link to original material, not the rewrites that have become so common by so-called “aggregators” that (in my view) do a disservice to everyone but themselves. Quoting myself (very briefly):

So, the next time you link to something, check it out a bit more. If it’s just a summary of someone else’s original reporting or analysis, take the extra few seconds to link to the original. Let’s all raise our linking standards, and give credit where it’s genuinely due.