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Do Knight’s regrets inspire charity?

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News of the Knight Foundation’s $20K speaker fee to exposed plagiarist Jonah Lehrer moved quickly through the media web, provoking negative press and, ultimately, an expression of regret by the foundation itself.

This alone, however, has not inspired critics of the foundation, who, in a series of comments on the Knight Foundation apology, raise pointed questions about the decision-making process that led to the payment in the first place:

  • “What most astounds me about this whole affair is that no one, not a single person at the Knight Foundation raised their hand to say, hey guys, this might be a bad idea. Such an egregious lack of judgment. Makes you wonder who’s running the show over there.”
  • “You are reacting to the negative press you received. Your apology is worse than the original ideia [sic.] to give Lehrer an Oprah-like platform.”
  • “$20,000 ‘was not unusual for a well-known author.’ Is this The Onion? I thought I was on a journalism site. This “well-known author” talks about the possibility of never being published again because his ethical breaches have alienated all his previous outlets. Would you pay $20,000 — for many in this country a year’s salary – to a ‘well-known attorney’ who’s been disbarred?”

And so on.

Self-examination is generally a good thing, and Knight’s contrition is most welcome. Yet the commentators have some important points that still must be received and processed by the foundation. My own concern is whether the incidental and bureaucratic nature of the expenditure (described as “not unusual for a well-known author to address a large conference”) represents the foundation’s systemic disassociation from the actual needs and actual struggles of working journalists.

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Noted: “Taking Stock of the State of Web Journalism”

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Categories: Newsdesk/Nonprofit News, Tags: , , ,

Tom Stites, an accomplished and indeed storied news hound (and a mentor and great inspiration to me), has produced this important article about the continuing decline in civic investment and recognized value of journalism, and original reporting in particular.

Read it, share it. You already live it.

“Taking Stock of the State of Web Journalism”
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/12/tom-stites-taking-stock-of-the-state-of-web-journalism/
By Tom Stites

It’s stocktaking time — five years since the Big March to the digital journalism future stepped off in 2006, strutting toward what was widely trumpeted as inevitable triumph. Auspicious events amplified the cheering:

  • The City University of New York launched its Graduate School of Journalism with an innovative curriculum and hired the outspoken citizen-journalism advocate Jeff Jarvis to direct a new interactive media program and teach entrepreneurship.
  • Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society widened its interest in the growing edges of news by adding to its roster of fellows Dan Gillmor, author of the seminal 2004 participatory journalism book We the Media, and the protoblogger Doc Searls.
  • In his widely followed PressThink blog, New York University journalism Prof. Jay Rosen headlined an item The People Formerly Known as the Audience; it immediately became a defining meme for journalism on the web, which empowers everyone to participate.
  • The Knight Foundation, the premier funder of journalism projects, kicked off its $5-million-a-year News Challenge grants program.

So, five years later, how’s the Big March working out for journalism — and for the democracy that’s so dependent on it?

  • As the digital march began, newspaper advertising revenue began its own march — off the cliff: five straight years of decline, verging on a 50-percent plunge. The decline is a bit less grim as it moves into its sixth year, but it shows no sign of turning around. The number of dailies has been in decline since 1973 and — no surprise — the failure trend accelerated with the ad crash. Newspapers are just starting to make some headway with metered website paywalls that show promise of generating Internet revenue that can offset more than a tiny fraction of print losses.
  • A parallel march, of laid-off reporters, editors, and producers leaving newsrooms of all kinds, has cut the nation’s salaried news personnel by almost a quarter over the same period. Despite contributions from varied web journalism efforts, the net amount of original reporting, the bedrock of journalism’s public good, is declining sharply. And so is journalism’s nourishment of civic health and democracy.
  • Two Knight-funded studies of web journalism efforts, including the comprehensive 2009 report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities, have praised lots of interesting efforts but found no business models that are both self-sustaining and replicable from community to community. The Knight News Challenge has run its five-year course and, after strategic review, the foundation says it will shift to three 12-week rounds in 2012; the foundation says it is shifting to include more of a “social investing” venture capital strategy in its work.
  • The most prominent web journalism business model with corporate millions behind it, AOL’s Patch, is drawing wide scrutiny and little if any optimism outside AOL that it will prove sustainable.

“Even as the [Knight] Commission did its work, the situation was getting dramatically worse,” Mike Fancher, the retired editor of The Seattle Times who helped write its report, wrote recently in a follow-up white paper. “Perhaps most importantly, emerging media struggle to be sustainable businesses.”

The buzz about how bloggers and citizen journalists will save the day, once almost deafening, has died down to a murmur ….

Read the whole essay at Harvard’s Neiman Lab Dot Org.

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Delivery matters.

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Categories: Newsdesk/Nonprofit News, Tags: , , , , ,

So you produce some top-shelf coverage, but the target population — the people who need to see it — are not connecting. Why not? More to the point: How do you solve that?

Enter California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting. They have an on-staff Public Engagement Manager. How cool is that? This cool:

California Watch’s stories about earthquake safety problems in schools reached hundreds of thousands of people through a statewide network of radio, TV and newspaper partnerships.

But the ones most affected by nonprofit news agency’s investigation were the ones least likely to read it — children.

That’s where Ashley Alvarado comes in. Her job as California Watch’s public engagement manager is figuring out how to deliver information to the audiences who need it most but are hardest to reach. This means that her techniques have to be as unique as the diverse communities that she’s targeting.

With the earthquake safety story, the solution was putting information in a kid-friendly format — coloring books. And not just in English, but also in Spanish, Vietnamese and both simplified and traditional Chinese, the most spoken languages in California.

California Watch had planned to print 2,000 copies, but the demand quickly exceeded that. By the time the outreach campaign ended in June, California Watch published 36,000 coloring books and distributed them for free. The site, Alvarado said by phone, is still getting requests for books from schools and organizations.

That, dear friends, is nonprofit journalism making itself matter. Brilliant.

Source: “California Watch’s engagement efforts show staffers what hard-to-reach audiences want,” Poynter Online, June 23, 2011

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KUSF is dead. Long live KUSF!

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Categories: Activities, Comment, SF Media Watch, Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The public outcry following the University of San Francisco’s secretive and unilateral shutdown of the legendary KUSF-FM was enormous. A planned public meeting staged by USF on January 20 changed location three times to accommodate the anticipated crowds.

Ultimately, the KUSF postmortem meeting/protest/public hearing was staged at USF’s Presentation Theater, on Turk Street at Masonic. With 470 seats the place was packed from the main floor to balcony. There was a large pot-banging protest stretching several blocks outside, which got the place up to capacity and left crowds milling around outside. There were SFPD inside, parked outside by the theater, and on the side streets. SFAppeal.com says 6 police cruisers and 20 officers were on the scene.

The actual meeting was contentious, with USF presenting it as a fait accompli, apparently holding all the cards with the papers signed and awaiting only the FCC’s rubber stamp. Media people who know the topic think it’s highly unlikely the FCC will derail the sale.

But the situation is definitely in motion. That was a darn big crowd of really motivated, talented, diverse and networked people. Who knows what they can pull off? They’re going after this from every angle.

Contingencies swirl … lawyers with advice are accreting around the volunteers … Doc Searles at Harvard sez the volunteers should angle for 87.7 FM, which the FCC just opened up, a frequency that merges into the low end of the TV spectrum, but still counts as FM radio …. notable public figures are being recruited, the legal angles are being dissected … And there seems to be a large, large effort coming together to shake up the FCC case — exploring apparently novel ideas around community access, as opposed to the usual, failed effort to protest a ‘format change,’ which the FCC doesn’t care about.

Independent Arts & Media was mentioned in the Bay Citizen for our official statement on the sale (the reference starts at paragraph 7).

The SF Weekly also filed a good, bloggy overview of the whole meeting yesterday, with great pix.

As for the temper and tone of USF, many, many other commentators have spoken of this, and they all seem on point. All I can add is that there are plenty of contradictions and doubtful assertions in the official line offered last night, and declarations about a lack of student involvement and a lack of other suitors which I personally know to be not at all accurate.

The volunteers are meeting again for more planning as I type this — and there will be many more meetings, and much more activity before this business is concluded.

If you are interested in this issue, one of the best places to get your data and plug in your energy is the Save KUSF Facebook page. I know Facebook sux, but it has its uses, and this one seems to be poppin’. Two days in and they already have over 4,000 fans. Pile on and let’s change the world AGAIN!

http://www.facebook.com/SaveKUSF
SaveKUSF.org

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Noted: “New F.D.A.: Transparence and Flexibility”

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Categories: Comment, Tags: , , , ,

A NYTimes article about the changing culture of the FDA illustrates the power of quality public information and an engaged citizenry:

During the Bush administration, the Food and Drug Administration was mostly a place of black-and-white decisions. Drugs were approved for sale or they were not, and the agency’s staff was expected to publicly support those decisions.

But as Thursday’s landmark decision on the controversial diabetes medicine Avandia makes clear, things have changed under the Obama administration.

. . .

Some of the changes have been driven by people like Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic whose 2007 analysis of Avandia’s heart risks stunned doctors, patients and legislators, who asked why the F.D.A. had not done anything similar. When the agency revealed it had done an almost identical analysis a year earlier and found the same result, the controversy intensified.

“You have these third-party analysts setting the agenda for the agency in ways that never happened before,” said Daniel Carpenter, an F.D.A. historian at Harvard.

For the F.D.A., the Nissen analysis presented major challenges. It demonstrated that the agency no longer had a monopoly on the information needed to make drug and device safety decisions. Data from crucial clinical trials are increasingly being posted on public Web sites. And academics are using sophisticated techniques to test whether popular medicines are safe.

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Shield Law Wouldn’t Apply to Non-Journalist Journalists

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While I’ve previously rhapsodized about open-media platforms such as WikiLeaks as an idealized, power-balancing mechanism for democracy, all that is only possible assuming that the expectations and practices of a free society remaining intact.

That is far from a safe assumption: The New York Times notes that an important shield-law bill for journalists is heading for a vote in Congress has been modified in the wake of the WikiLeaks/Afghanistan story:

“Senators Charles E. Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, Democrats of New York and California, are drafting an amendment to make clear that the bill’s protections extend only to traditional news-gathering activities …”

So what exactly is a traditional news-gathering activity? And who, for that matter, is a journalist? Both of these things could be addressed in the bill in a manner that seems hostile to both technological and social innovation.

One step in this direction is to add specific language to the bill …

“… defining who would be covered by the law as a journalist — an area that can be tricky in an era of blogging and proliferation of online-only news media outlets.”

Reference:

“After Afghan War Leaks, Revisions in a Shield Law Bill”
New York Times, August 4, 2010

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WikiLeaks has changed everything.

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Categories: Comment, Tags: , , , ,

The WikiLeaks/Afghanistan story is a watershed moment for journalism in the online era. It didn’t just recalibrate the official Afghan war narrative. It also exposed a raw nerve about the leadership role of legacy news media in serving democracy’s vital information needs.

While its headline-stealing panache offends some the news-world’s high priesthood, the entire imbroglio has only reinforced the value of traditional journalism as a formal, methodological and professional process of inquiry and publishing.

All this adds up to a truly new media ecology, one that has been struggling to be born, and which, if it survives and propagates, will change the conversation of democracy, the nature of self-governance, and the business of journalism.

No boundaries, no borders.

NYU media observer Jay Rosen notes that WikiLeaks is a “stateless news organization,” one that can “report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it.”

In doing so, Poynter Institute’s Steve Myers asserts, WikiLeaks is “changing the news power structure” in profound ways, even as it deepens the need for professional journalism as a practice:

“It has cracked open governments and corporations without apparent repercussions because it has no headquarters, no printing press or transmission tower, no physical address. It’s just a confederation of skilled volunteers and Web servers. In that sense, WikiLeaks is of the Internet.

“In inserting itself between source and publisher, WikiLeaks has shifted power away from the monoliths that once determined what is news and toward the people who, before the Web, would have been stopped in the newspaper lobby before they could see a reporter.

“WikiLeaks allowed The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel access to the Afghanistan war logs a month early as long as they kept quiet until WikiLeaks published them on its site. In striking that bargain, those news organizations found themselves not as gatekeepers of information, but as guests with VIP access.

“And yet WikiLeaks needed these titans of old media. It needed their reporting, their reach, their distribution networks, their reputation.”

Sources vs. partners.

This is an uneasy relationship and has fomented bitterness amongst press champions and critics alike.

As quoted in the Columbia Journalism Review’s hard-boiled retelling of how the war logs made the leap from a wiki to the traditional press, New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt takes pains to distance his work from Assange

“I’ve seen Julian Assange in the last couple of days kind of flouncing around talking about this collaboration like the four of us were working all this together,” says Schmitt. ”But we were not in any kind of partnership or collaboration with him. This was a source relationship. He’s making it sound like this was some sort of journalistic enterprise between WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and that’s not what it was.”

In Myers’ Poynter column, Times editor Bill Keller also carefully (and more soberly) also defines it as a source relationship — one that is altogether seemly and responsible:

“Deep Throat had an agenda. Ellsberg had an agenda,” Keller told me by e-mail. “That doesn’t invalidate the information they provide us. If we refused to work with sources whose motivations we didn’t share, a lot of important stories would go untold.

“The critical thing is what we do with the material — check its authenticity, draw our own conclusions from it, put it in context, and lay it all out for readers on our terms, not the source’s terms.”

The difference between “source” and “partner” is a defining issue for journalism as a pragmatic industry and an idealistic practice, with implications for the power and legitimacy of both.

Press leadership or media innovation?

Consider the bitterness of marketing blogger Jordan Zimmerman, a non-journalist everyman who seems to suggest that if the Afghan war-logs story were left to legacy news media, it would never have even been investigated in the first place:

“The media has been censored over the years. It’s now made up a bunch of lackluster, lazy journalists who are afraid to go after a hard-core story. Maybe it’s because they’re afraid of losing their jobs. Whatever the reason, it’s an outrage. No wonder newspaper readership is declining! It’s because journalists today lack the guts to write the stories that need to be written … WikiLeaks, on the other hand, isn’t afraid. They put it all on the line to talk about real issues… Whatever happened to free speech, and freedom of the press? These are fundamental principles on which this country was built. Don’t people deserve to know the truth? At the very least, don’t they deserve the opportunity to have all the information available and the freedom to draw their own conclusions?”

Leslie Griffith, an award-winning SF Bay Area TV news anchor, expresses the same bitterness even as she praises WikiLeaks as a serpent-slaying “Wiki-Tiki-Tavi”:

“Now, we have Pvt. Bradley Manning and the head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, doing what reporters should have been doing all along [emphasis added]. Out of fear of being fatally scooped, and in the continued hope of keeping America dancing to their jingoism tune, the Pentagon and FOX News are now calling these whistleblowers traitors.”

WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum sounds a similar note in an interview with his longtime friend Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing, that uniquely hacker-centric bucket of fascinations, cultural observation and anti-secrecy sentiment:

Boing Boing: What do you think of the White House reactions so far to the “Afghan War Diaries” leak?

Jacob Appelbaum: It’s clear that the White House is attempting to shoot the messenger. These documents provide concrete evidence of events that have occurred during the last six years of the Afghan war.

Boing Boing: The Department of Defense has called Wikileaks a “national security threat.”

Jacob Appelbaum: Wikileaks is not a national security threat; we are an international security promise.

Boing Boing: What do you mean by that?

Jacob Appelbaum: We promise our sources that we will get their information to the public. We have released information about what is actually happening in Afghanistan. We are telling you the facts as the US military saw fit to document them. We are telling you these facts because they document an important first-hand perception of everyday life in Afghanistan that our source felt important to show the world.

This new media-ecology is not yet mature nor even truly widespread. But it promises to be an extraordinary growth medium for true democracy — i.e. one not plagued by what Lawrence Lessig calls “the economy of influence.”

Meanwhile, journalists must learn to love, or at least live with, the hackers and open-society advocates who are at once their sources, their collaborators and their goads.

This comment was updated with light copy edits on July 7, 2011.

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Toward a Post-Privacy Society: The $1,500 Cell-Phone Tap

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Categories: Comment, Tags: , ,

Tangential to the Wikileaks story is this fascinating AP news item.

Is a world without secrets a technological inevitability? Not without a fight, I reckon, but extrapolate a few human generations out, and the sociological consequences are fascinating:

Hacker builds $1,500 cell-phone tapping device
By Jordan Robertson, AP Technology Writer

Saturday, July 31, 2010

A computer security researcher has built a device for just $1,500 that can intercept some kinds of cell phone calls and record everything that’s said.

The significance of Chris Paget’s work is that it shows how cheaply such devices, which have been around for decades and are often used by law enforcement, can now be built by hobbyists with equipment easily found on the Internet …

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Amazon & E-Books: Inventing Their Own Trend?

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Is this whole e-book thing a self-fulling prophecy of the mass-market, mass-media world? If so, what does it say about the quality of the text produced by the companies that service those markets, the role of such text in society, and the difference between a surplus of evanescent fascinations versus those vital works of prose and verse that one wishes to preserve and savor for the ages?

All the buzz about Amazon selling more e-books than hardcovers therefore seems curious. In terms of pure economics, I personally almost never purchase hardcovers because they’re too expensive, the ones I own are always used and cost less than $5 — or, on occasion, something I splurge on because it’s special and I want it to stick around.

Generally, I purchase paperbacks. Amazon’s press release neglected to note the number of paperbacks sold, which underscores the fact that while the phenomenon of e-books outselling hardcovers is “interesting,” it’s also a calculated effort to boost their own brand, their Kindle reader, and the cultural phenomenon they hope to make much hay out of.

Thus, one wonders whether the journalists and news outlets feverishly reprinting Amazon’s press release about the triumph of the e-book may be doing just that — reprinting a press release.

The New York Times did better than that, however, in noting that paperbacks were excluded from Amazon’s calculation, and that the press release itself is a volley in Kindle’s sales and psychological battle against the iPad:

“Amazon does not specify how paperback sales compare with e-book sales, but paperback sales are thought to still outnumber e-books …

“Analysts said Amazon’s announcement could assuage investors’ concerns that the iPad threatens Kindle sales. Amazon’s stock price is down about 16 percent in the last three months, in part because of those fears.”

What The Times doesn’t mention is what this cultural trend overall means. I know there’s plenty of prognostication about the death of bookstores and print books, but I think a lot of it is akin to feverish goading rather than actual cultural forecasting.

I spoke with a bookstore manager yesterday at an author reading, and asked how business was.

“We can barely keep up,” she said.

Does this boost her hopes about her shop surviving the Kindle?

“Remember,” she noted, “we only need to lose 25% of our customers to the Kindle to go under.”

It occurred to me that part of that phenomenon, however, was linked to the cost of their rent, for a shop centrally located on a chic and busy San Francisco thoroughfare.

One other thought — perhaps the boom in e-book sales is linked in part to what Clay Shirkey calls “Cognitive Surplus” … there’s lots of time, lots of ideas, lots concept,  text and easy-to-access, easy-to-create media in the world now. In his review on Shareable.net of Shirkey’s new book, Paul M. Davis notes that:

“It’s as easy to post a lolcat as it is to report breaking news; as immediate to share a photo with friends on the other side of the world as it is to show it to a neighbor.”

I will add a corollary to that relevant to e-books, to wit: Print books are complicated, expensive and in the mass-market context, quite disposable. They are in fact a form of cognitive surplus, and not necessarily a good form. Perhaps we have too many lousy books out there, pushed out too easily by commercial mills with profit, only profit, on their minds.

E-books are easy and a great place to dump the stuff that shouldn’t have been in print in the first place.

When something deserves to be in print, needs to be in print, the market and the means will remain. Perhaps not on the scale and with the profit margins that mass-market media corporations demand, but … so what?

As Ursula LeGuin pointed out in her Feb. 2008 Harper’s essay, “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading”:

“I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?”

E-books, hardcovers, paperbacks … they’re all media with a place and a role in society. When something is important enough to end up in print, it certainly will. For the rest, the Internet is an accommodating host.

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Noted: “Uproar at Scienceblogs.com”

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Columbia Journalism Review weighs in on a controversial Pepsi-sponsored nutrition blog at Scienceblogs.com. It’s a fascinating parable on the negative impacts of commercial sponsorship on information media:

“At least two well-respected science journalists and a handful of scientists have canceled their blogs at the popular and heretofore highly respected ScienceBlogs.com community, protesting Seed Media Group’s decision to give PepsiCo a nutrition blog … Scienceblogs.com has [since] taken down the Food Frontiers blog, writing, ‘We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way.’”

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