BuzzMachine

I don’t have nightmares about 9/11. But I do have an ongoing fear that occurs to me occasionally on my daily rides on the PATH train that took me to the World Trade Center that day: I worry about an attack that would flood the tunnels. On a very long list of bad ways to die, that is a leader. Not to come off as too neurotic, but I don’t like heights and thus bridges and I’m not a great swimmer and so though I don’t fear water I know that being plunked into the middle of a river via boat or bridge would not have a happy ending. So getting to work on an island everyday becomes problematic.

Especially today, as The Times reveals a report that says the PATH tunnel system is particularly vulnerable to terrorist attack and flooding.

My first reaction is: Oh, thank you, Times, for revealing our soft underwater belly to the terrorists. My next reaction is: They say the report was — pardon me — leaked because the Port Authority isn’t doing enough to safeguard the tunnels.

The Times says it is withholding details about how attacks could flood the tunnels but then goes right ahead and gives the terrorists the punchline, the worst-case analysis, which is the one they really want: “. . . a bomb that could be easily carried aboard a train could punch a 50-square-foot hole in one side of a tube, possibly breaching both sides of the tunnel. Under that situation, 1.2 million gallons of water a minute could pour into the tunnel, flooding parts of the system in a matter of hours.”

Now I can think about that everytime I ride to work (and I’m damned glad I’m working at home today). As a correspondent and fellow PATH commuter said in email last night: “Jesus Christ. I don’t think the Times means to sound alarmist, but as someone who rides in Hudson River tunnels 2x a day, it’s pretty scary. On the other hand, it’s nothing I don’t already think about twice daily anyway….

Jeff Pulver started quite the memealanch with tagging people to find out five thins about them. And there’ve been lot of microbios worth reading. I just wish everybody had tagged these posts so I could now go read them all. How could we forget to tag the tagging?

The Wall Street Journal reports that the judges on the federal appeals court gave the FCC a tough time in oral arguments over fines against Fox:

The judges bored in on the FCC argument. Noting that the hearing was being broadcast on C-Span, the judges quizzed Mr. Miller about whether news programs that subsequently air the oral arguments — where the offending words were sprinkled liberally throughout — would violate FCC standards.

Mr. Miller said likely not, as the words are used for legitimate news purposes.

“This seems to be a scheme that depends on what you [the FCC] think instead of having objective criteria,” said Judge Rosemary Pooler, part of the appeals-court panel. “Are you just telling the networks … to make some sort of cockamamie claim and they’ll survive?”

Judge Pooler kept Mr. Miller on the defensive throughout his half-hour long argument, telling him he seemed to contradict himself over whether broadcasters can claim virtually anything has news value. Later, she asked why the FCC had cited a need to protect children from profanities when it had cited no studies finding children were injured by them, but yet had never sought to penalize broadcasters for violence in programs when many studies show they do injure children.

I smell a Constitutional moment coming on. Fingers crossed.

The fuss over Judith Regan at News Corp. is getting publicly nastier and nastier with unnamed executives now dredging up more Mel-Gibson moments to weaken her PR and perhaps legal stances. It’s looking like the fight scene in a Japanese monster movie, with Godzilla and Mothra waging their battle in public, outside of court. It’s all quite unseemly.

The LA Times gives slightly snarky coverage to the phenom of amateur journalism:

Across the country “citizen newspapers” are springing up, full of promise, energy and atrocious spelling errors. They’re largely written by unpaid, untrained and unedited citizen reporters, who say they “commit acts of journalism” more for kicks than out of a sense of civic calling.

But I loved the quotes from Prof. Phil Meyer, author of The Vanishing Newspaper:

“What you’re seeing is a radical new way of doing journalism. We’re back to the time of the lonely pamphleteer or the tramp printers in the Europe. . . .

“What you’re seeing right now isn’t the end product; it’s in development. We old-timers look at it and say, ‘This is terrible. This isn’t journalism.’ But, in fact, this is something that has value and needs to be developed. . . .

“I close every semester by saying, ‘I’ve just taught you journalism as it was practiced in my day. The journalism in your day is going to be different. It’s up to you to invent it, please don’t mess it up.’ “

Congratulations to Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington — and the FTC — for saying on PayPerPost’s ass so that they now require disclosure.

I never cease to be amazed how flummoxed media people can get over having to interact with the public they serve.

The common mistakes they make are to think that communities do not need tending (your real communities do, why wouldn’t those online?) and that communities should be judged by their worst elements (every town has its criminals but not every town is full of them) and that there’s nothing you can or should do about it except complain (don’t just drive by the crime, people, call the cops) and, finally, that we all need to be told who the bozos are and protected from them (we all have good bozodar, don’t we).

But I see news people throwing up their hands at the first nasty troll who enters a conversation, ready to abandon it all. It’s like owning a restaurant and when a drunk disrupts the diners, rather than getting rid of the guy, you just close the restaurant. No, you deal with it. And you don’t concentrate on that drunk. You concentrate on all the nice, civilized, happy diners you’re serving. Right?

I’ve just seen a flurry of posts from people trying to give advice to flummoxed media types. See Ryan Sholin, my former and present colleague Kevin Anderson, and Mark Potts. [all via linkmeister Stabe]

My earlier advice on interactivity is here.

And note, for amusement, the Journal-Register of Springfield, Ill, declaring today a bad-mood-free day on its story comments. Note, though, that they don’t take comments on the story about comments.

Beet.TV gets its first video ads from Google. There’s the first trickle. Now wait for Google to create an ad infrastructure for video everywhere. The comes the flood.

C-Span is airing Fox’s oral arguments (can we say “oral”?) against the FCC before the Federal Court of Appeals Wednesday on its channel and its web site as well was on Sirius and XM. Go get ‘em!

Click To Play

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the infrastructure, effort, and expense of big TV v. small. Lately, I took along my video camera as I did a few things with ABC 20/20, Frontline, and CNBC.com and, as a demonstration, whipped together this little video. I tried to show the effort that goes into a simple interview in network news: four pros who spent hours setting up and taking down a shoot and who put great effort into getting it just right (and they were all nice enough to put up with me taping them). I wanted to make fun of the TV convention of B-roll, in which they get allegedly casual footage of you being yourself so they can use it in editing (and then I made two seconds of my own). And I was fascinated by CNBC.com’s smaller TV for the internet. My video quality is crap (something to do with getting video off my old camcorder, since replaced) and my editing is amateurish — but then, that’s the point.

Go here to get shareable links.

: LATER: A commenter thought I was being snarky about the guys having to wait between shoots. Not at all. Want to make that clear. As I say in the video, these guys are real pros and they do their jobs extremely well and they were also terribly nice explaining some of what they do to me. Ditto the Frontline people. It’s not their fault that the form has come to expect B-roll. What fascinates me is the contrast between the time-honored way to shoot TV and the new possibilities. That’s my point.

Cops in Canada and the U.K. use YouTube to try to get evidence in investigations. Another example of crowdsourcing, but then good police work always has been. So we’re dispatched not only to report but also to get their man.

Here’s my Guardian column this week — about making mistakes and corrections online — in full:

The internet speeds up the dissemination of not only information but also misinformation. So what are we to do about this? Regulate? Legislate? Complain? Ignore? Or respond?

Consider the experience of Tim Toulmin, director of the Press Complaints Commission, when the BBC reported online that he thought bloggers should subscribe to a voluntary code of conduct, or else there is no redress for errors. I was one of many bloggers who responded tartly. On my site and on the MediaGuardian podcast, I called Toulmin - with apologies, dear readers - a “Brit twit” for thinking that one could regulate this vast conversation, which is what blogs really are.

Only problem is, Toulmin didn’t say that. He told me by email that if he had, he might have understood my moniker for him. But instead, he complained to the BBC and to me, making reference to damage and lawyers. Both of us clarified what we wrote. And Toulmin told his tale in last week’s MediaGuardian.

The internet can be better at corrections than old media. A fix can be attached to an error where it occurs, and many online denizens pride themselves on confessing missteps faster than their print and broadcast counterparts. But the internet can also be worse - online, errors can spread wider faster and take on a longer half-life. I wish we had a technical solution - that everyone who linked to an incorrect article could receive an alert and correction.

The internet brings a fundamental change to the relationship of publisher and subject: now the subject can publish, too. So Susan Crawford, a professor at New York’s Cardozo Law School and a member of Icann, the board that oversees internet structure, has blogged that in this era, “libel law seems much less relevant - rather than sue, you can just write back”. A commenter on my blog responded that some bloggers boast larger audiences than others, so this playing field isn’t as level as it seems: “On occasion, a weak target can become a cause célèbre.” True. But I still argue that libel law was built for an era when few owned the press and the doctrine must be updated to account for the democratised and accelerated means of response today.

Should blogs subscribe to a code of conduct? I don’t think so (and neither does Toulmin). Again, blogs are mostly just people in conversation and I don’t wave a code when I talk to my neighbours and friends; I know that my integrity rests on my credibility. On the other hand, when I argue that bloggers who commit acts of journalism should enjoy the rights and privileges of professional journalists, how can I say that they should not suffer the same regulation? Well, for me, that’s easy, because as an American first amendment absolutist, I bristle at any attempt to regulate speech.

And I do fear that in their efforts to protect truth, legislatures, courts and self-appointed industry watchdogs could chill speech in new ways. If the people fear retribution without the legal resources that the owners of presses have, they will either shut up or hide behind the anonymity the internet allows. That would be a tragedy.

We need to recognise that the internet alters how media operate. Blogs - whether written by professionals or amateurs - tend to publish first and edit later, which can work because the audience will edit you. In this medium, stories are never done; rather than turning into fish-wrap, they can grow and become more factual and gather new perspectives, thanks to the power of the link and, yes, the correction.

We all make mistakes. We’re human. And the internet makes our humanity more apparent than polished print and broadcast do. So we need to modify our expectations of media, tune our scepticism, update our laws, restrain our regulation and enhance our technology. We are left, though, with the same ethic of the error we have always had: it’s wrong to make them and right to correct them, and you get a bonus for apology. So, Mr Toulmin, I’m sorry.