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April 20, 2004

Turn-off turn-off week
: Reason editor Nick Gillespie skewers and roasts the bozos who push TV Turn-Off Week -- which is like pushing turn-off culture week; turn-off interaction week; turn-off curiosity week.

If there's one television rerun more dispiriting than endless iterations of Scooby-Doo, The Brady Bunch, or the genre du jour of plastic surgery shows such as Extreme Makeover and The Swan, it is surely that annual ritual of self-loathing and mortification of the flesh that is TV Turnoff Week...
Ten—or maybe 15 or 20—years into the future, we'll be talking about Web Turnoff Week and thinking warmly of the days when we used to cuddle up in front of the TV with a good show.

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Blogging the rails
: I'm on the Acela to Washington for the American Society of Newspaper Editors blog panel (blogging to follow) and I'm online thanks to my Treo and PDANet. High-speed mobile blogging.

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The Citizens' Media Association: a proposal

: Out of the Bloggercon session on blogs as business, the clear and resounding wish of the assembled bloggers was to start a trade association that will enable business and sell the wonders of our new medium.

So here is a proposal for the Citizens' Media Association (working title), a first step for discussion.

I was frankly surprised at the popular acclaim for the idea of such a group. I'd added it to the wiki the night before the session, thinking it would bring polite chuckles at best. But when one of the bloggers at the session said it out loud, an epidemic of head-nodding evertook the SRO crowd. To make sure it wasn't just polite conference-think -- people do lots of nodding at conferences -- I had the crowd vote on what they thought was the single most important thing we needed to make blogs work as businesses. It was about even: a trade association and better stats on the size of the blogosphere (and the latter, most agreed, would be a task of the former). So a trade association it is.

Note that I'm expanding this past weblogs, for we don't know what will develop now that the people own their own printing presses and broadcast towers. And the last thing we need is to get into a fit of exclusionary orthodoxy about what is and isn't a weblog.

If you want a model, start with the Online Publishers Association, which sells marketers on the effectiveness and importance of quality online sites. Look also to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which is more concerned with such matters as ad standards.

The Citizens' Media Association

The Association will:

> Gather and disseminate statistics on the size and success of citizens' media in terms of both audience and revenue: total audience; total traffic; audience demographics; author demographics; audience behavior online; audience buying behavior; categorization of interest areas; census of languages and national origins of sites; total projected ad revenue; total projected commerce revenue; collection of success stories.

> Set standards for the means of gathering audience, traffic, and demographic data and for advertising units and measurements.

> Protect citizens media practitioners by seeking libel and liability insurance and by seeking, through courts and lobbying, to assure that the rights of a free press extend to citizens who create media online.

> Promote the medium with advertisers, marketers, media, and newsmakers.

Membership will be open to any creators of citizens' media online. The association will be governed by an executive committee elected by the membership.

The Association will be supported by member dues and, if possible, a foundation grant to encourage the growth of this democratizing medium.

Next step: A meeting of volunteers to establish a steering committee and set its goals for drawing up a mission statement, bylaws, and a budget.

How's that sound?

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A Saudi blog
: There's a Saudi blogger! called Religious Policeman. His mission:

A Saudi man's diary of life in the "Magic Kingdom", where the Religious Police ensure that everything remains as it was in the Middle Ages.
In Memory of the lives of 15 Makkah Schoolgirls, lost when their school burnt down on Monday, 11th March, 2002. The Religious Police would not allow them to leave the building, nor allow the Firemen to enter.

The latest post:

When the Saudi people finally rise up in revolt and throw out the House of Saud, it won't be for democratic reform, and it won't be for an islamic republic. It'll be about mobile phones.

So there's the first crack in the wall. I'll predict we'll soon be seeing more Saudi blogs... and more and more...[Thanks, Easycure!]

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Frequent fly
: From AdAge (print edition only): Viagra is introducing a frequent customer program.
Buy a bunch of pills and get some more free.
As if guys who use the pill a lot actually need further motivation.
Maybe they should come up with a more creative giveaway:
For every pill you buy, get two free cigarettes.

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The Daily Stern

: TAKE IT BACK: A wide-ranging group of concerned Americans -- broadcasting companies, performers' unions, Margaret Cho, Penn & Teller, the ACLU, Minnesota Public Radio -- filed a complaint with the FCC yesterday asking it to revoke its decision calling Bono's F-word profane.
Written by Robert Corn-Revere -- a First Amendment attorney I spoke with for my soon-to-appear story on all this -- and a colleague, it points out the absurdity of the FCC's position (and, by extension, Congress' efforts to make things even worse). Lowlights:

The Commission’s decision that the isolated use of an unplanned and unscripted expletive is both “indecent” and “profane” represents an unconstitutional expansion of the government’s intrusion into broadcast content.... [T]he FCC’s decision is a rule of general applicability that already is exerting a substantial chilling effect on constitutionally-protected speech.
With this decision the Commission has abandoned the regulatory restraint mandated by well-established judicial precedent. The indecency policy has long been recognized as a very limited exception to the basic constitutional command that the government cannot reduce viewers or listeners to viewing or hearing only what is fit for a child....
The Commission’s aggressive crackdown on “coarse” speech has sent shock waves through the broadcast industry and the lack of clear guidelines, coupled with threats of draconian administrative action, has forced licensees to censor speech that unquestionably is protected by the First Amendment. By prescribing delayed broadcasts as an “element” of its indecency calculus and putting station licenses at risk even for unintentional slips of the tongue, the FCC is undermining the ability to engage in live broadcasting in America....
[Petitioners urge the Commission to] seriously examine whether the system of government regulation of content announced in this Order, including its threats of potential license revocations, is fundamentally incompatible with the First Amendment of the Constitution.

There's a fun little legal cha-cha over what variants of the F-word are now no-nos:

Despite its purported attempt to clarify its indecency standards by decreeing that “any use of [the ‘F-Word’] or a variation, in any context, inherently has a sexual connotation,” the Commission has only made matters more confusing. To begin with, it is not even clear whether the FCC is purporting to ban just the word “f***” or would also restrict its euphemisms, including the term “F-Word.” While in other circumstances it might be reasonable to assume the government intends only to ban the actual word and not its semantic replacements, it is not safe for licensees to rest on such an assumption where a wrong guess can cost a station a huge fine or lead to license revocation.... Moreover, the Commission warned broadcasters that it intends to interpret its mandate broadly, to prohibit “vulgar and coarse language” including “words (or variants thereof) that are as highly offensive as the “F-Word.” As a consequence, many other commonly understood euphemisms in addition to the “F-Word” may be unsafe to broadcast.

And then there is the delicate problem of profanity as a form of blasphemy and blasphemy as a matter of religion:

The range of statements encompassed by blasphemy and divine imprecation, both religiously based, is far removed from the sphere of indecency which the Commission had heretofore sought to regulate. The most commonplace of divine imprecations, such as “Go to Hell” or “God Damn It,” are now actionable under Golden Globe Awards. By encompassing such protected speech, the profanity standard’s blasphemous and divine imprecation components are impermissibly and unconstitutionally vague and overbroad.
By bringing its suddenly heavy hand down into this area of religiously oriented speech, the Commission also has impermissibly breeched the First Amendment wall that separates church and state.

The filing outlines the chill all this is already causing, including this:

Classic Rock format stations have dropped several such songs from their rotation, including The Who’s “Who Are You,” Pink Floyd’s “Money,” Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” Steve Miller’s “Rock ‘n Me” and “Jet Airliner,” Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns & Money,” and Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher.” 43 Stations also have been forced to drop or edit more recent songs by such critically acclaimed artists as Pearl Jam (“Jeremy” and “Why Go”), Alice in Chains (“Man in the Box” and “Heaven Beside You”), Guns ‘n’ Roses (“Its So Easy” and “Mr. Brownstone”) and OutKast (“Roses”). Even pop songs generally thought innocuous, such as John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” or “Play Guitar” and Sheryl Crow’s “A Change Would Do You Good” have been edited for radio, or in some cases, dropped altogether.

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Not to be an ass but...
: Wired reports on Bloggercon and got this wrong:

Another journalist, Jeff Jarvis, former Sunday editor of the Daily News, lamented the loss of having an editor to watch over him.
Jarvis comments on politics on his blog, called BuzzMachine. Without an editor, Jarvis said he has had the complete freedom to become a blowhard.
"I plan on writing an entry soon," said Jarvis, "which I will call 'Blogging made me an asshole.'"

Actually, I was lamenting having to deal with an editor again. Blogging has made it impossible for me to play nicely with them anymore. But more on that later. You already know the headline....

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Church, state, and brothel
: Scott Donaton, editor of Ad Age, suggests a new wall between church and state in magazines: one for magazines that try to deliver news, a different wall and set of standards for magazines that deliver entertainment: "Each side could then operate by a standard of editorial integrity judged against the expectations of their respective audiences rather than those of journalistic watchdogs."

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Blogs about biz
: Rick Bruner has started yet another blog to compile links to blogs about business.

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