I’m sorely disappointed in Columbia Journalism School Dean Nicholas Lemann’s piece in The New Yorker about “journalism without journalists.”
I would have hoped for something more expansive, imaginative, open, creative, generous, constructive, strategic, and hopeful from the head of one of America’s leading journalism schools — from, indeed, the man hired to bring that school into the future — and from a leading light of American reporting.
Instead, Lemann pits professional journalist v. blogger — as if any more ink need be spilled on that putative battleground — and sets up his easy strawmen to tear them down.
His strawman king: that bloggers believe they will replace journalists. I don’t know a single blogger who says that with a straight face. But that is what professional journalists — fewer and fewer of them, actually — think they hear bloggers say and so they snipe back with very straight and sometimes red faces: ‘Yeah, you and who else?’
His next strawman is that some blogging is not journalism or is bad journalism and thus all blogging is not journalism because it is not performed by journalists. He points to some quaint examples of human speech in blogs — more on those in a moment — and dismisses it because it is not institutional and profound. Well, I can point to lots of allegedly professional journalism — somebody paid for it — in lots of newspapers — like the wee daily near me — and on lots of TV and radio stations in this country that is folksy, chatty, uninformative, badly written, and often utter crap. Does that mean that all professional journalism is crap? Of course not. It’s a lazy argument. And while I’m at it, dare I say that I can dig out lots of Talk of the Town pieces and letters from correspondents over the years in The New Yorker that did little or nothing to inform the nation and were written in a once-anonymous, faux folksiness that tried to simulate the humanity and real life you hear in the excerpts Lemann mocks.
The strawman he presents at the start of his essay is that bloggers think they are all inventing something new and that they are really just descendants of the pamphleteers who spread their words with opinion and agenda at the time of America’s founding, long before modern institutional journalism was invented. Stipulated. Says Lemann:
They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved.
I don’t know a blogger who does not agree with that — at least writer-by-writer, if not regarding the medium as a whole. Bloggers proudly point to the pamphleteers as parents. They don’t say they are new against the history of conversation and publication, information and advocacy. Bloggers say they are new when set against the current conceit of institutional journalism that it is objective and dispassionate and is the steward of truth and trust — a kind of journalism that Lemann himself concedes is relatively new. Says Lemann:
In fact, what the prophets of Internet journalism believe themselves to be fighting against—journalism in the hands of an enthroned few, who speak in a voice of phony, unearned authority to the passive masses—is, as a historical phenomenon, mainly a straw man.
But he is a strawman of your making.
The next strawman is me: I am held up as an example of unrestrained blog snarkiness and for that he found quite the juicy tossed tomato, a snitfit I had in 2003 when The New York Times’ John Markoff trotted out his own strawman (one I’d thought to be extinct by now) about blogs being the next CB radio. Markoff also said that he didn’t need a blog because The Times is a blog. I fisked that interview with Markoff and looking back — this came out two weeks after the first Bloggercon — I have to say I still enjoy it. Lemann didn’t even quote my nastiest line: “You know, institutions worry about letting reporters blog without editing but they don’t worry about letting a jackass like this out without a leash.” Opinionated, blunt voices scare big-J Journalists. But we don’t always yell. Only when provoked.
And finally, if there’s any hay left, there’s Lemann’s belief that journalism’s standards were set by the professionals. I’d say they are still being set by the public who have always decided every day whom to believe and whom to trust — only now, we get to hear their decision process.
So Lemann continues to paint this as a fight: bloggers v. journalists. He continues to try to define journalists as the professionals, to define the act by the person who performs it (and, implicitly, the training he has) rather than by the act itself. He continues to try to limit journalism to journalists, wanting in his last line for reporters (note, he didn’t say reporting) to move to citizens’ journalism.
I so wish I had seen him instead imagine the possibilities for news when journalists and bloggers join to work together in a network made possible by the internet. I wish he had seen journalism expanded way past the walls of newsrooms and j-schools to gather and share more information for an informed society. I wish he had used his lofty perch to see beyond the horizon to a new future for journalism and the students he — and I — are teaching now.
Nicholas Lemann, head of Columbia’s J-school writes a piece in his magazine alma mater, The New Yorker, today trying to pit professional vs. citizen journalism (and he includes a post from me at my theatrical snarkiest). I’m in the front seat of my car (not driving) and I’ll write about the piece shortly. But I wanted to give you the link now.
Imagine this from the vision of Tom Evslin: What if all our Skype widgets had a button that allowed us to test and report the speed at which our Skype voice packets were being allowed through by our ISPs. What if then — following the 1 percent rule — just 400,000 of Skype’s 40-million-plus regular users hit that button and reported in how Skype’s — and other applications’ packets — were treated by their ISPs.
This would produce an incredible data base showing whether ISPs are, indeed, discriminating against certain packets and applications to advantage their own. I suspect Cablevision of playing wack-a-mole with my Skype because it works fine on slower lines elsewhere but horribly when I try to do interviews with the Guardian or the BBC (which prefer Skype) from home. But I have absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true. Evslin had similar suspicions about his satellite ISP and when I last saw him, he said he wanted to get folks at a place such as Skype to provide the necessary technical details to know how to test — and how to get many people — to test their packets. And wouldn’t it be great if that were as easy as hitting a button on Skype that tested and then reported the results to a central repository?
That is reporting, distributed reporting, pro-am reporting, networked reporting, whatever you’d like to call it. It is the people connected and gathering information that no one reporter could gather alone.
Now a reporter could take that data and go to ISPs to find out their side and get a good story out of this that has a big impact — one way or the other — on the net neutrality debate. Is there a smoking gun of discrimination to favor ISPs own packets? Or not? Let’s find out and report it.
Now, of course, there is also a sort of Heisenberg principle (using the bastardized definition of it) at work here: When the reporter calls, the ISP may say, ‘Oh, this is a mistake. We don’t discriminate.’ And whatever was switched on gets switched off. Or this could happen simply when the ISPs notice that they are being watched by the magic button. So the act of reporting affects the news reported (but then, it often does).
Now a journalist might say that this ruins the story. But the essential role of reporting remains in force: Journalism is a watchdog and now companies know that their customers are their watchdogs. Every customer is now a reporter.
One can imagine no end of ways to enable such large-scale distributed reporting. Some services are trying to get people to report gas prices. Jay talked about surveying prescription drug prices across the country. The Star-Ledger in New Jersey used to get high school counselors to share data that no colleges share on who really gets in and doesn’t (so what if thousands of college students shared their scores, grades, activities, acceptances, and rejections). We could all log out calls to customer service of certain companies — what gets fixed and what doesn’t and how long it takes. We could report and compare how much our local government officials are paid and spend: Every citizen is a reporter. Imagine the possibilities.
The consumption use of news across media is fairly constant. Use of newspapers is shrinking. Says Pews: “…even the highest estimate of daily newspaper readership — 43% for both print and online readers –Â is still well below the number reading a print newspaper on a typical day 10 years ago (50%).” That leads some to believe that interest in news is thus decreasing, but Pew says that’s not the case:
The rise of the internet has also not increased the overall news consumption of the American public. The percentage of Americans who skip the news entirely on a typical day has not declined since the 1990s. Nor are Americans spending any more time with the news than they did a decade ago when their news choices were much more limited. In 1996, people on average spent slightly more than an hour (66 minutes) getting the news from TV, radio or newspapers. Currently, they spend virtually the same amount of time (67 minutes) getting the news from all major news sources, the internet included.
So news is that much of a chunk of life. People want that much news and they then allocate how to get their news across more choices and more means to get the news that is relevant to them. Some might say this is evidence of attention scarcity but I think it’s more like interest scarcity: News is only so worthwhile. An hour a day for news is a quite sane proportion — large, I think — but it is limited.
But one constant remains: Local and community news continues to be the biggest draw for newspapers. And as was the case during the mid-1980s, roughly nine-in-ten of those who at least sometimes read a newspaper say they spend a significant amount of time getting the news about their city, town or region.
: More from Pew:
People who say they logged on for news yesterday spent 32 minutes, on average, getting the news online. That is significantly less than the average number of minutes that newspaper readers, radio news listeners, and TV news viewers spend with those sources. And while nearly half of all Americans (48%) spend at least 30 minutes getting news on television, just 9% spend that long getting news online.
I think that’s a bit of a red herring. The use of each medium is different: one passive and time-based, another directed and involved. Even so, it’s clear that the internet is not taking over news. It is remixing news time. Says Pew:
The web serves mostly as a supplement to other sources rather than a primary source of news. Those who use the web for news still spend more time getting news from other sources than they do getting news online. In addition, web news consumers emphasize speed and convenience over detail. Of the 23% who got news on the internet yesterday, only a minority visited newspaper websites. Instead, websites that include quick updates of major headlines, such as MSNBC, Yahoo, and CNN, dominate the web-news landscape.
And then they add this:
To some degree, news consumers are drawn to the internet for the very reason that it does
not take much time to get news online. Most users say what distinguishes web news is its format and accessibility  the ease of navigation, speed with which information can be gathered, and convenience “at my fingertips.”
I wonder whether there is a way to get another measure of news: how many stories, how many topics, hoe much information, rather than just how much time. In other words: If you spend 30 minutes watching TV news, you get a handful of stories. If you spend 30 minutes online, you could get dozens of stories or you could spend a long time on one. Time is not the best measure. I want to know about the number of news nuggets mined.
Much more to dig into in the Pew survey….
: LATER: Nicholas Carr writes about the survey, too. He tries, as usual, to turn this into a confrontation, though I don’t think it is; it’s all a matter of degree and time but the trends are the trends.
(By the way, Carr never passes up an opportunity to snipe at me as his resident philistine, which is fine, and I’ve parried back. But I’ll also note that when we met at an Annenberg event, he didn’t have the guts to say any of that, face-to-face. I sought him and and joked that we were matter meeting antimatter. He did not discuss his apparent efforts to feud. But then he got back online and immediately brought out the rifle again. It’s odd to define oneself by what one is not but if you do that, I suppose you need to find or manufacture an opposite number. This is all beside the point. And that’s my point.)
One’s reign lasts such a short time online. The Guardian notes that Alexa [insert standing and necessary caveat about small and odd sample here] reports YouTube has exceeded MySpace.
I don’t agree with those who say that YouTube is unpurchasable because of bandwidth costs and rights issues. Viacom got over the latter with iFilm and a million or two a month is nuttin to big companies. But more important: This is just too big to ignore. This is more than a new network. It’s a new TV, two-way TV, the TV run by the people on the other end of the rabbit ears. And some players in the old tv — yes, networks, but more likely cable companies that are quietly watching their hegemony over distribution disappear — or some would-be players in the new tv — see AOL’s announcement today — have to be talking about gulping and buying. Because Time Warner is in both worlds, it would make sense for them … but then, their own divisions, let alone worlds, can’t talk to each other, who who knows. Comcast is smart and strategic enough and big enough to do this; I think my money’s there… for now. I’ll be interested to see MySpace watcher Scott Karp’s take on this.
Four recently redesigned news sites carry common themes: white space, shades of blue, bolder type. When The Times redesigned, some saw similarities with New York Magazine before it. Now I see similarities with The Telegraph and News.Com.AU. It’s a good look: news with oxygen.
Memo from Sports Illustrated to America Online: We don’t need you anyway.
After being rebuffed by its Time Warner sibling AOL on a proposal last year to build a major sports portal together, Sports Illustrated is nailing down a deal to expand its relationship with Yahoo, presenting a planned “My SI” desktop application to agencies and striving internally to improve its online video.
Time Warner is the most dysfunctional of families.
The book business can be so exasperating. In today’s Times Book Review, an editor there, Rachel Donadio, writes about how book publishers just can’t figure out how to make money on the long tail…. even though book publishing is the long tail.
Sometimes, you just want to pick publishers up by the scruff of their J. Crew collars and shake some sense into them.
The first step, which the Times essay misses entirely, is that the internet lets new people find books that are relevant and necessary to them that they could not have found before, greatly expanding and extending the market for backlist books at no cost. But the people will find those books only if the books can be searched…. and only if they have permalinks allowing others to link directly to the interesting ideals and valuable information in them.
And then, as a few publishers points out, yes, it is tough to figure out how to stock all these books:
Books require storage, and it quickly becomes impractical for publishers to keep low numbers of thousands of titles in their warehouses. “The costs associated with printing small quantities of many different titles and of warehousing those many different titles and of fulfilling single-copy orders . . . are so onerous that it’s not a model that I feel works for publishing today,†said Terry Adams, the director of trade paperbacks at Little, Brown. Susan Moldow, the executive vice president and publisher of Scribner, agreed. “It only works if you’re employing some kind of print-on-demand,†she said, referring to a technology that allows publishers to print a few books at a time, as they are ordered.
Well, let me suggest a model, learning from both Amazon and eBay, where instant gratification costs more but patience pays off (which is also proven by Netflix.com). So:
* Charge the most for immediate delivery, which is enabled because you either stock some number of books in inventory or use more expensive print-on-demand. This is the equivalent of eBay’s ‘buy it now!’ and of Amazon’s overnight shipping. Let’s say that costs the reader $25.
* Charge less if the reader is willing to wait — depending on demand — one to two weeks. Over that time, you collect more orders for the book and can print it in larger batches (especially as print technology improves). I wait two weeks or more to get stuff from Amazon with free shipping. Let’s say that costs the reader $20.
* Charge less again if the reader is willing to take the book as a PDF and read it in that mangled, inconvenient form or go to the expense of printing it themselves. Let’s say that costs the reader $15.
* Charge less again if the reader just wants access to read the book online — a subscription, in essence. Let’s say that costs the reader $10. There is also a growing market in book rentals. My father uses a Netflix for books called BooksFree. What if the publishers starting running such a service themselves, creating a subscription market for books in print or online. So rebuild the old book club business by selling subscriptions to authors, topics, bestsellers, and so on: Pay a flat monthly rate to read as much as you want! Or pay $100 for a lifetime subscription to Anne Tyler. You now have an annuity and pay-in-advance customers.
* And if you want to get fancy, involve your current channels of sale in the deal: Buy the copy of a book in the bookstore right now for $25 or get one delivered to you — with the bookstore getting its cut — for $20. Thus, the books on the bookstore shelves become retail samples and you don’t have to take the inventory risk and cost to fully stock those shelves. And the bookstores can stock more sample books, selling more titles. The tail grows.
* Get yet fancier and involve your long-tail partners — search engines and blogs — in your sales with affiliate deals that — shhhhh, don’t tell anyone — cut out the current retailing middlemen and give you higher margins.
* Now let’s get crazy and follow the NewAssignment.net model: Pay for a book that you wish someone would write. If enough people anty up and pledge to pay, say, $10 each, I’ll write my Dell Hell book (or perhaps some would pay me not to write it) or the Dummies guys would commission Dell Returns for Dummies only if they saw sufficient demand or Tom Evslin, capitalist that he is, would be motivated to write a sequel to HackOff.com or get it translated into French.
The Times essay also complains that the internet is making it easier to buy used books, which cuts into backlist purchases. Well, the answer to that is to follow methods such as the ones above to make original purchases easier, quicker, and in some cases cheaper. You will also cut used-book sales when you extend the in-print life of books by these methods. Obviously, today, the only way readers can get most book titles is by buying used books; the publishers create this market for used books by taking books off the market. That doesn’t have to be true anymore.
Why am I giving away this advice for free? Well, I was thinking about writing a book about this and the necessary upheaval in the book business as a poster child for the explosion of media. But my agent warned me, quite rightly that someone else is pitching a book about books. Well, with very roughly 100,000 new books a year in the U.S. and 200,000 in English, that should be no surprise. This is the long tail, damnit. There can and should be four different books with different viewpoints. But this is the way the book business works. This is how they do, indeed, think. And that is one of a hundred reasons why it seems to take a hundred years to publish one of the little suckers, only to live on a shelf in relative obscurity for four weeks before hitting the remainder tables and then the used-book store and then complete obscurity forever. So maybe I’ll just write it as an online manifesto and screed (or maybe you’ll pay me not to).
It doesn’t have to be that way anymore. The internet is not the enemy of books, authors, publishers, and ideas. The internet is your friend, damnit. As with other media, these guys think shrinkage when they see these new challenges because it affects their old business. They should be thinking expansion: what opportunities are created for new business.
But first, the publishing industry has to rethink what it is. When I spoke at the Guardian’s management offsite a year ago, they had in the president of Kodak UK to talk about what it was like to have to convert an analogue company into a digital company overnight — because the Guardian realized it must do that, too.
Well, publishers don’t need to decide to be all digital overnight…. yet. They can still print books, especially beloved blockbusters. But they do need to realize that they are long-tail companies, that the more content and the more demand they can create and satisfy for it in for more niches with longer life and greater efficiency, the better off they will be. Is the business the same as the one they have now? No, of course not. It’s not the same business it was 25 years ago, either. So stop trying to just protect the old and figure out how to invent the new.
Randall Stross writes a rousing sales pitch for CEOs to blog in today’s Times:
C.E.O. blogging should no longer be viewed as extreme sport. Mr. Schwartz’s example shows that blogging fits quite naturally into the chief executive’s work week. In an exhortatory piece, “If You Want to Lead, Blog,†published in The Harvard Business Review last year, Mr. Schwartz predicted that “having a blog is not going to be a matter of choice, any more than having e-mail is today.â€
“My No. 1 job is to be a communicator,†Mr. Schwartz told me last week. “I don’t understand how a C.E.O. would not blog if committed to open communication.â€
Assuming that other chief executives are willing to make their thoughts just as visible as Mr. Schwartz’s, the blog provides a highly efficient medium of publication. Mr. Schwartz, for instance, simultaneously reaches shareholders, software developers and current and prospective customers. With posted responses, these groups easily reach him as well as one another. . . .
“They should come down from the mountain and communicate in their own words — without handlers,†Ms. [Debbie] Weil [author of “The Corporate Blogging Book,†which Portfolio Hardcover is to publish this week] said. “For what they’re paid, is that too much to ask?â€
Who are the CEOs you think would most benefit from blogging?
So I took my unsuspecting teenage son to see Woody Allen’s Scoop and here’s the funniest part:
The entire audience was geriatric. There wasn’t a person in the theater — in a decent crowd, by the way — who was under 50 and most won’t see 60 again. Not one hair follicle — those left — carried its natural color of youth. My son personally lowered the mean age in the place by 30 years.
I tell you, Woody Allen is the newspaper of film directors: His audience is dying off.
: The movie was cute if twitchy because Allen’s in it. Scarlet Johannson is not as sultry as she was in their last movie; she’s a reporter — a journalism student — and so she has to act awkward and twitchy herself, since reporters are like that, aren’t they? Yes, they are.
But she had her moments as the hardened reporter dame. And in the right light, her hair shone red and she looked like an imitation of none other than Ana Marie Cox. Separated at the casting couch:
Jack Shafer at Slate says that the growth of the national edition of the New York Times is shrinking and dumbing down local papers. He launches off from this study (pdf) to declare in his headline: “How the New York Times Makes Local Papers Dumber,” and then to confess: “A brief note about my provocative headline: George and Waldfogel never describe local newspaper adaptation as ‘dumbing-down.’ That’s my personal interpretation of what it means to become more local while targeting a less-educated audience, and I’m sticking to it.”
Wrong. The local strategy in the face of both the New York Times — and far more important, but ignored here, the Internet and cable — is the right move for local papers.
But there’s more here than that. Both Shafter and the study authors, Lisa George of Hunter and Joel Waldfogle of Wharton, reveal a number of common presumptions and prejudices about news:
Shafer assumes that local is dumb, which is to say that national and foreign is smart. That is a coastal prejudice: What happens in Washington, New York, and maybe once a month in L.A. is important and everything inbetween, in the flyover, is just dumb.
Shafer is also revealing his assumption about journalism: that the big, national story is closer to real journalism; the rest is just dumb.
Shafer and the authors lament that when The Times comes to town, the smarter readers (read: those living in better-educated zip codes) leave the local papers (“per capital local newspaper sales are 7% higher in low-education zones and 16% lower in high-education zones”). I’m not sure I buy that they proved the causality instead of merely a correlation; the growth of the internet occurred at the same time, giving those smart readers lots of choices — including to get their local news online, where the smart (which in this case just means college-educated and richer) went early on.
The biggest assumption they all make is that the people who dropped their local papers for The Times read and cared about the local news in them in the first place. This is the assumption of lecture media: If we told them, then they listened because we told them. But there is tons that I don’t care about and don’t read in the six papers — yes, six — we get each day (my wife reads most of them). See, you can lead a horse to paper, but you can’t make him read.
Finally, the study notes that when The Times’ trucks invade, the readership in the educated zipcodes decreases — but the readership in other (read: dumber) zip codes increases. Their assumption is that the papers got dumber. No, the papers may have just gotten more useful; they may have gotten rid of the often boring, commodity news that the editors think is important but the people don’t.
Maybe the local papers didn’t lose the smart people. Maybe they lost the people who didn’t care about local anyway. Or maybe they lost the snots. Or Yankees fans.
In any case, it would be a terrible business model to keep wasting paper and staff on the stories you can get not only in The Times but also online and on cable. But Shafer and the study authors unconsciously reveal just a stumbling block papers have to adapt to the competitive internet age. They still want to be all things to all people. They never were. They just didn’t know it. And they still want the ego of covering the big stories, even though no one cares about their bylines. They never did.
The summary of the study says:
In the late 1990’s, the New York Times implemented a national distribution strategy, establishing or expanding home delivery in more than 100 cities across the country. Using cross-sectional and longitudinal data on local newspaper circulation, Times penetration, and local newspaper characteristics, we find that as the New York Times circulation grows in a market, local newspaper circulation declines among college-educated readers. Local newspapers reposition toward local and away from national coverage, raising circulation among individuals without a college degree. Availability of national newspapers in local markets changes the relationship between local preferences and local products.
The study says that this harms some readers and benefits others but says nothing to define either harm or benefit. It makes a value judgment without defining the value.
They complain that “[i]ndividuals who switch from a local to an outside product might consume less local information, leading them to disengage from local affairs along the lines suggested by Robert Putnam in his well-known essay and book Bowling Alone. . . . An individual watching a fishing channel on cable television cannot, for example, simultaneously attend a political rally, read a local newspaper, or actually go fishing.” That’s simply the story in media today: We have choice.
So the real moral to the story about those Times trucks is that it is but one indication of what happens when a monopoly is challenged. The trucks installing high-speed internet had, I’m sure, a much bigger impact. We have choice and so we’re not stuck with our local papers anymore. And that will make us smarter.
We’ve been focusing more and more on local news over the past two or three years, and as a result, have often been accused of “dumbing down.” Best I can tell, that means that whenever we don’t have the latest on Iraq or the Middle East or Washington politics on the front page, we’re contributing to the ignorance of the populace.
Has nothing to do with the Times. The Times as Wal-Mart analogy isn’t even close. In an age of 24/7 television news and many, many cable information niches, when millions of Web sites deliver every speck of detail anyone could want directly into the home and when broadband connections are growing faster than kudzu, why wouldn’t a newspaper want to specialize in what it knows best — its own community? . . .
You can read our paper and get a healthy dose of things that happened in Guilford County yesterday and things to do in Guilford County today and tomorrow. You can also get a taste of news from around the world. We can’t be all things to all people any longer. Too many choices are out there.
I know that many people don’t care what the City Council does or what the school board does. They don’t care about crime in low-income areas or knowing that airfares are high at PTI. Or even that both the Girls Gone Wild and Jeopardy visited Greensboro in the same week. But a lot of people do. It’s all a part of being engaged in what’s going on in your community. Community extends around the world, too, which is why we still have national and world news in the paper. But it’s not what we can do best and it’s not our focus.
: CBS, thank goodness, is going to make a court challenge to the FCC on the Janet Jackson case that supposedly had American culture tripping over its fallen knickers. At long fucking last. As Mel Karmazin, former head of CBS, has said: The reason CBS and other networks did not challenge indecency rulings in the courts was because the FCC blackmailed them by holding up licensing. So the indecent indecency laws have not been challenged since the ’70s. It is high time for a court case. If only they’d had the sense to mount this case before the last Supreme Court appointments.
: PBS is also ready to fight for the freedom to say a supposedly nasty word in Ken Burns’ new documentary on World War II. The occasional bad word can only liven up a Burns show, I’d say. Said Paula Kerger, CEO of PBS:
“To be able to see a documentary and to be able to let people tell their own story and not censor the words that are coming out of their mouths is tremendously important. That’s why this is such a big issue for us, and that’s why it is important for public broadcasting not to just roll over, but to be very clear that, in order to tell some stories, we may need to use language that, at the moment, the FCC is not sure they feel is appropriate for broadcast television.” . . .
Kerger said that reading recent FCC decisions on obscenity fines doesn’t help. “It’s a moving target. It’s hard to figure how to navigate through these decisions because there’s no clear guidance. We certainly have a couple of cases coming up that I hope we as an industry will stand together on and be bold.”
PBS could avoid a battle over “The War” by airing it after 10 p.m., outside the FCC’s so-called safe harbor of early prime time.
“I think this is going to be one of the seminal works of his career, and it deserves to be seen by the broadest possible audience,” Kerger said of the Burns documentary. “This is not just about Janet Jackson. This is about filmmakers with powerful stories who are not being allowed to tell those stories on public television or on broadcast television.”
Our nannies in the House of Representatives officially declared war on social networking yesterday, overwhelmingly passing a law that would prohibit public schools and libraries from allowing anyone not an adult to use “chat rooms” and “social networking” sites. The definition is so broad that most of the Internet could be blocked.
The law, titled “Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006,” could block not only MySpace, but also Amazon.com, most major newspaper sites, Wikipedia, personal weblogs published on sites like Blogger.com.
The standards, according to cnet:
(i) is offered by a commercial entity;
(ii) permits registered users to create an online profile that includes detailed personal information;
(iii) permits registered users to create an online journal and share such a journal with other users;
(iv) elicits highly personalized information from users; and
(v) enables communication among users.
The bill now advances to the Senate, where it can be voted on by boobs who think the Internet is made out of tubes.
This is clearly a First Amendment matter. In all the talk about the digital divide, the point is made that anyone can go to a library to use the internet. But if this is enacted, they won’t be able to go to a library to publish. Their speech will be cut off.
