BuzzMachine

I’m suffering from serious paper envy. I’m in London reading The Guardian (full disclosure: I’m consulting there this week, and write for them), The Times, the Evening Standard, The Observer, The Independent, The Mail, not to mention the Metro, the Daily Express, and, for the fun of it, The Mirror and The Sun. And I’m loving it. They have energy and imagination and lots to read. Their businesses are changing, like papers elsewhere. And they have the advantage of being national. But I hear a lot more whining and gnashing of teeth in America from monopoly papers. Competition is good.

I’m just catching up with this. Poynter’s “ethics group leader” Kelly McBride decrees that citizen journalism isn’t journalism:

It’s great that newspapers host these sites. It’s a wonderful service for community. They are often interesting, vibrant and exciting.

How incredibly condescending. Yes, one could say the same of newspapers, couldn’t one?

But it’s not journalism. So don’t call it that.

Who died and gave you the keys to the profession and the dictionary?

Journalism is an independent act of gathering and assembling information by an organization.

That’s patently absurd. What does an organization have to do with it? Journalism is an act that can occur anywhere, anytime, by anyone.

The work is completed in service of the audience. The journalists’ loyalities are with the reader and viewer. You might question the independence and loyality of various news organizations, or even all news organizations. But at least, in theory, you expect those values to guide the process of gathering news.

Try flow-charting the logic of that paragraph. I expect my friends and neighbors — the citizens who report — to be guided by values, too…. more than organizations.

I’ll tell you one thing that citizen journalists don’t have or need: “ethics group leaders.” Such people are appointed by think tanks precisely because there are organizational ethical lapses that make people think there is a need for such a thing.

This comes out of the kerfuffle over people gaming Yourhub by putting up press releases as if they were stories. Well, that’s reason enough to throw out the medium. But, of course, then tv stations and newspapers running press releases — glorified with a run through the typewriter, or not — would cause a similar dismissal of them as journalism, wouldn’t it?

Malcolm Gladwell has a blog.

In the past year I have often been asked why I don’t have a blog. My answer was always that I write so much, already, that I don’t have time to write anything else. But, as should be obvious, I’ve now changed my mind. I have come (belatedly) to the conclusion that a blog can be a very valuable supplement to my books and the writing I do for the New Yorker. What I think I’d like to do is to use this forum to elaborate and comment on and correct and amend things that I have already written. If you look on my website, on the “Blink” page, you’ll see an expanded notes and bibliography, which mostly consists of copies of emails sent to me by readers. Well, I think I’d like to start posting reader comments for everything I write, and this is a perfect place for that.
There are also times when I think I’ve made mistakes, or oversights, and I’d like to use this space to explain myself and set things right.

It’s the book that never ends.

Tristan Louis, who makes creative and smart analyses of the number of the blogosphere, is starting a research grant to get help.

The Evening Standard returns to Fleet Street in a photo feature that’s in the paper today — but, sadly, not online — showing that the turf once dominated by pubs for sodden hacks has now been taken over by coffee bars. It’s not just Fleet Street. All over London, coffee (Starbucks and others) and quick-lunch joints (Pret, Eat, et al) have taken over the street and the lifestyle. Instead of a pint and bangers and a conversation, Londoners are seen dashing through the streets with a Starbucks cup and a Pret cucumber sandwich. What has the world come to?

Well so much for those turn-off-the-tv festivals of media snobbery. The New York Times reports that two University of Chicago economists find that TV is not bad for kids.

Most studies that find negative effects from television compare groups of children who watch television to those who do not, even though the economic situations of the two groups are in all likelihood very different, Mr. Gentzkow said. The new study, however, was based on what the authors call a “natural experiment” that resulted from the way television was introduced in the United States in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, when some cities got TV service five years ahead of others.

Data from cities where preschoolers were exposed to the new technology, and data from cities where they were not, was correlated with test scores from about 300,000 students nationwide in 1965, as collected in the Coleman Report, a survey done under the Civil Rights Act. The study also looked at test scores from pre- and post-TV age groups within cities.

The result showed “very little difference and if anything, a slight positive advantage” in test scores for children who grew up watching TV early on, compared to those who did not, said Mr. Shapiro.

Media are good.

This week’s Media Guardian column on Kevin Rose and the Digg empire. Excerpt:

I recently trained the faculty of the journalism school where I teach how to blog, vlog, podcast, wiki, and Digg. Actually, my son demonstrated Digg, and that was the most controversial moment of the day, as the professors fretted about second-rate stories getting on the front page. Jake showed them how the members can label a story “lame” and off it goes. He made it clear that Digg is owned by its public and that’s why it works. Shouldn’t all news organisations wish the public owned the news?

In the U.S., Saturday papers have sucked for years and lately I’ve come to the conclusion that Monday papers suck, too. It’s probably a result of cutbacks: less weekend staff and all that. But I come to London and pick up the Monday Guardian and there’s the beefy Media section (full disclosure: I’m in it) and the equally beefy G2 section, both of which were cooked up the week before: tons to read, even on a Monday. Why can’t American papers do that?

I’m in London and thanks to advice from Ken Rutkowski, I just did something need with my telephony: I forwarded my U.S. mobile to my Skype account and, in turn, forward that to a UK mobile phone, so my family and colleagues can call my U.S. number locally and I will pay local rates here.

I’m flying to London today to spend two packed days at The Guardian and two more at the Online Publishers Association confab. I’m sorry that I won’t be able to do London meet-ups; the schedule is full with work. Blogging will be unpredictable because the days are jammed and because I’m still dragging thanks to my afib. I quizzed the doctor a dozen ways whether it was OK traveling, but my blood is as thin as stone soup now, so he assures me it’s fine. I’m scheduled to get plugged into the wall socket on the Monday after I return and he’s just as glad I’ll spend more time getting thinned. I’m also using my infirmity as a convenient if stretched excuse to try the new Eos Airlines: all flat-beds, endless legroom, decent wine, electric sockets — for the laptop, not me — but, alas, no wi-fi; can’t have everything.

I just noticed, via the Editors’ Weblog, that the Dallas Morning News is going to insert CD-ROMs into the paper in April.

I don’t get it: Two old media equal a new medium? When was the last time you stuck a CD-ROM into your computer? Now this has allegedly been working in Europe, though I thought that was often for distribution of music CDs and Murdoch complains that it doesn’t permanently raise circulation:

It’s like magazines giving away sneakerphones to get you to subscribe…. or newspapers keeping TV listings to keep you subscribing. It’s not about the core product: news, local news. And there is a much better, more dynamic, less expensive, more personal way to delivery digital content: It’s called the internet.

The last great technological innovation from the Dallas Morning News, let’s remember, was the Cuecat.

BBC correspondent Justin Webb writes a blistering account of the waywardness of American Democrats.

Democrats do not have a message on the key issues of our time. Or, more precisely, they have several mutually exclusive messages….

From World War II until the Reagan revolution the establishment in the US was socially progressive. There was a belief that there was such a thing as society, and its ills could and should be tackled. Now, there are plenty of Americans who still hold those views, but the arteries which once fed them into the nation’s vital organs, have been clogged or cut.

The universities do not have the power they did, professorial authority is less respected.

Most importantly, the worlds of entertainment and news (which used to pipe a vaguely left-wing message into the nation’s homes) have been blown to bits by technological changes which render them powerless.

There are 600 channels on my television. I never watch any of them.

But if I did the chances that my neighbour has watched the same thing (particularly when you add the broadband internet options now available) have shrunk to virtually nil in the past few years.

The Democrats need a message and a new way of communicating that message to a mass audience. They have neither.

We can debate the fate of the Democrats — and after the Bush Administration is finished with them, the fate of the Republicans, too. I’d say that the two parties today look about as fit and just as happy together as Time Warner and AOL.

: But what I find particularly interesting about Webb’s argument is his contention that that the internet’s fracturing of the media industry has a direct impact on the left. Oh, sure, some will say that’s because the left owned Hollywood and Sixth Avenue, but let’s get past that obvious old saw and ask the better question: Has the left, indeed, had a necessary dependence on media? Hmmm. I’d say that the rise of the right via Fox News would be evidence to the contrary.

But perhaps it’s not the use or control of the media but, instead, the appropriateness of the message for the medium of the time. Cue McLuhan.

Broadcasting — sermonizing — to the masses was, then, inherently liberal.

Narrowcasting — ranting — on cable is better for the conservatives.

But what about the internet? It’s tailor-made for the libertarians. The internet is the embodiment of individual liberty, the great product and celebration of freedom.

When blogs started, I wondered why so many bloggers seemed to be libertarian, why they gathered in this medium in apparently disproportionate numbers. That’s obvious to me now. They have found their home. They have the message and the medium for it. But they’re just as disorganized as the Democrats and the Republicans. It’s not just about Democratic disarray. It’s about a benign anarchy sweeping the politics of the land. [via Francis Turner, the Olive Tree]