BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis

May 31, 2005

The scoop

: The Post reports on the story behind the story in Vanity Fair and how The Post got scooped: because Woodward kept his promise not to reveal Deep Throat's identity until he was released from the pledge. The Vanity Fair story was edited by my colleague and friend, David Friend.

Vanity Fair, too, was late to the story but moments after it broke on the internet, the text came online.

: Also in the Post, Hank Steuver contemplates life after the secret:

What could be more of a letdown than finding out who Deep Throat is? Finding it out in Vanity Fair? And not really finding it out in Vanity Fair so much as feeling it crash-land across the Internet and the cable news networks, days before the magazine even hits the stands? Finding out that you don't care anymore? Watching it not resonate among people younger than 30?...

Perhaps Deep Throat's lovely (and daring) parting gift to Washington, especially to reporters, is simple: He actually exists. He is not fabrication or composite. He is one man, a fact not easily proved had he taken his secret to the grave. That in itself, in an era where trust has been shredded beyond recognition, is something to behold.

: And on anoymous sources, from Kit Seelye's NY Times media report:
The emergence of the ultimate anonymous source comes at a time when newsrooms are struggling with questions about the use of such sources.

"We've had all this stuff about anonymous sources and God knows yes, we all know anonymous sources are overused," said Lou Cannon, a former reporter for The Post. "But this really shows you, this story would have never come out if we had a rule against anonymous sources."

The world is a city desk and all the people merely correspondents

: Finally got some couch time and read Glenn Reynolds' good Wall Street Journal piece about how anyone can and will report.

Ombud too many?

: Why does ESPN need an ombudsman? For Cubs fans to complain about Cubs jokes? What's next: A FoodTV ombudsman to deal with garlic issues? Has this trend gone too far?

Deep Throated

: Isn't it a little embarrassing for the Washington Post that Deep Throat outs himself -- Mark Felt says he's the guy -- but the Post has to run a wire-service report quoting the paper's own "no comment"? Wodward and Bernstein still say they won't say anything until Throat dies (felt is 91 and so that may not be too far off). The story is breaking via Vanity Fair, which also doesn't have it up online.

: Thanks to Bill K for putting the scoop up in the comments. At first, I thought it was clever new comment spam but, no, it was breaking news. Thanks, Bill.
: Just got the call that I'll be on MSNBC's Connected at 5p to talk about this.

: UPDATE: Tristan Louis corrects me: The Vanity Fair story is up here. It's now up on the mag site proper.

: OOPS: Students said they had nailed who Deep Throat was. They were wrong.

: Tim Noah summarizes now-out-of-date speculation.

: The Post proper isn't touching the story still but it's Aschenblog is. Handy, them bloggers.

: FLASH: Woodward confirms that Felt is the Throat.

I'm about to go on MSNBC, blogging from the studio, and I"m hearing guests who said this wasn't true backtracking fast. Most amusing.

Bottom line: A good conspiracy theory never dies.

: If Watergate happened today, Deep Throat would have had a blog.

: I was about to go on and then they broke in with a press conference from Felt's family. I was in the middle of opening my mouth to speak; how many would love to stop me at that point. I don't know whether I'll get back on...

... I didn't.

: I say this is a good day for democracy. In this age of transparency, we believe that the people deserve to know. And Felt was an agent of truth. So was journalism. That remains a story to aspire to.

Media 2.0: Plastics, plastics, plastics

: Here is a superb powerpoint on the new economics of media. I'll excerpt and comment later but you'll want to dig into it now. [via PaidContent]

Podcast open the doors

: Ernie Miller asks a great question: Why isn't Congress podcasting itself? Every committee and debate should be available for us to hear.

I'll take it down a few levels and suggest that every town board and school board should be podcast. I've long wanted to see local services enable citizens to video these meetings because, ironically, the very reason I care most about what happens in them -- I have kids -- is the reason I can't attend them. But I'd watch them, I used to say.

Well, who needs to watch them? They just sit and drone. Listening would work well -- especially when podcasts can be searched and indexed.

We should all storm our town halls and demand podcasts (and then politely explain what podcasts and iPods and the internet are).

Grow up

: I've come to believe that newspapers and network news are barking up the wrong tree trying to attract young people, holding their conferences and issuing reports and fretting about what they want so we can give it to them.

The problem is that such a strategy is inherently condescending and pandering and that's why I don't think it will work.

As a wise colleague of mine, Joan Feeney -- my editorial partner at the founding of Entertainment Weekly -- once wisely said, if you build a new product based on a demographic, you will lose. If you build a new product based on a great idea with passion behind it, you just might win.

Time Inc. -- where Joan and I worked at the time -- had tried for years to create magazines for women and consistently failed, because it was men who were trying to figure out what they -- women -- wanted. Freud couldn't have successfully edited some of the tripe the regimes then published. As another colleague of ours famously said, the men at Time Inc. saw women "only from neck to knees." It took Time Inc. years to learn that magazines aimed at women would fail, but magazines women like will succeed (witness People, InStyle, and others).

The problem with the youth strategy is that it treats young people as if they are alien beings. But they're just people, like you or even white-bearded me. They're not "they." They're "us."

You don't have to be young to use RSS or an iPod or mobile digital networks or wi-fi. You don't have to be young to appreciate the conversation the internet enables. You don't have to be young to question authority or distrust the press.

When we hear research about how young people treat news differently it could just be that they are the generation freed to think differently, unencumbered by our old-fart habits. If we old farts would free ourselves, we'd think differently, too.

So what's the right strategy?

Serve news to anytime anywhere because anyone should want that. Join in a conversation because no one wants to be lectured to. Be honest and transparent because no one has to trust you.

It's not about age. It's about change.

J-

: We're suddenly hearing much debate about about the future of journalism schools -- following (though perhaps it should be leading) -- the debate about the future of journalism.

But the discussion I've heard so far has focused exclusively on journalism students and professional journalists and has left out a vital constituency: the public.

Just as the definition of news is expanding, so should the definitions of journalist and journalism ... and journalism education.

As citizens practice journalism, they need to be let into the cathedral before they come and tear it down.

Big, old, professional, traditional, mainstream news media should support -- rather than exclude -- these citizens with content, promotion, training, and revenue. They must do this to support the practice, the expansion (yes, expansion), and the business of journalism.

And, so, journalism schools should help support these citizen journalists, or they risk being left out of the future of journalism.

Journalism schools can train citizens in tricks of the trade (and remember: it is just a trade): How to get access and information, how to write and package, how to use tools, how to research, how to vet and verify.

But journalism schools must also learn from the citizens: How the people view the press, what information they need (rather than what we say they need), new standards of trust.

Journalism schools should not issue ethical codes but collaborate with the public journalism serves to debate ethical issues in the press.

Journalism schools can study the changes in the press brought on by the internet and citizen's media, can help big media adapt and survive, and help citizens practice this craft well.

All of which leads, no surprise, to a plug for my own hobbyhorse:

: A CITIZENS' MEDIA CENTER: About a year ago, I plugged the notion of a Citizens' Media Center that would bring together journalism students, citizen journalists, big-media journalists, and newsmakers. I was going to start to raise funding for a planning grant but then got tied up in some of the knots of the foundation and university worlds (alien earths to me). But this is an opportune moment to plug it again. Here is a short version of the proposal I wrote (which I'd change a bit knowing what I know now). Take a look.

: ON JOURNALISM SCHOOLS: Much of this discussion is coming out now because of the new Carnegie-Knight initiative to improve journalism education. Here are a few of many links on the topic:

At Broadcasting & Cable's blog, Joel Meyer contemplates the future of j-schools on the occasion of his own graduation from one with good links to Greg Lindsay's j-screed and David Halberstam's commencement speech at Columbia and Howard Finberg's report on the new Carnegie-Knight initiative on improving journalism education.

Lindsay:

Do you side with the establishment in hopes that you will someday inherit it; or do you subvert the status quo by creating something new in hopes of winning a place at the table down the road?

In case you haven't already figured it out: By enrolling in j-school, you (perhaps unwittingly) picked the establishment. Any guesses as to what's on the other side? Bloggers, for one. The debate about whether bloggers are journalists ultimately boils down to a struggle about whether the former should be granted the privileges and pay packages of the latter. Bloggers are outsiders seeking status the only way outsiders know how: by prying it away from those who currently have it.

Finberg:
Journalism professors are often torn between the needs of the practical -– turning out well-trained journalists -– and the desire for the scholarly, which provides more job opportunities.

Some journalism educators who hope to adjust curriculum to reflect the digital age find themselves hampered by accreditation policies....

The future of journalism training is not an academic debate. It is tied closely to the larger issue of training for professional journalists.

The media industry has spent little on –- and paid little attention to -- the continuing education of its professionals....

Tim Porter:
The question, of course, is one that confronts all institutions trying to change: Can the priesthood reinvent itself or will good intentions - even those with a $6 million underwriting - be swallowed by tradition and intransigence?

One indication that the temple guards - to continue the metaphor - are still going to control the acolytes is the emphasis the new initiative places on investigative reporting....

Investigative reporting is a critical differentiator for professional journalism from the media noise we live in, but should it be a core element - an emphasis - of journalism education over other components? I'm not so sure.

I would substitute and start with community journalism (which I know does not exclude investigative reporting). Most journalists coming out of school are confronted either with small town newspapers or suburban news bureau in their first jobs, where investigative reporting is about as popular -- or wanted -- as first-person essays.

Andew Cline with a most insightful view of journalistic arrogance::
The plain fact of the matter is that most journalism is practiced at the local level for modest news organizations. That's where most of our students will go to work. And I think we do our students, and the citizens of the communities in which they practice, a disservice by encouraging (even) our (best) students to believe that good journalism must be practiced at big-time news organizations.

The only size that matters in journalism is community assessment of its quality (does it help do what must be done?) and not its bigness in terms of national influence or circulation....

* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that national is better than local.

* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that the audience is "general."

* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them to elevate investigative reporting over solid day-to-day reporting.

* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them to value winning prizes for their work.

* We teach students to be arrogant when we fail to teach them what language really is, how it really works, and how people really use it.

* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that journalists have more First Amendment rights than citizens.

* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that journalists are responsible for making democracy work.

* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them to ignore the fact that they are players in civic affairs.

* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them the nonsense of the philosophical ideal of objectivity rather than the objective process of good reporting.

* We teach students to be arrogant when we fail to teach them that the public always knows more than they do.

Donica Mensing on the role schools could play:
Journalism educators clearly have a stake in the outcome of restoring trust in the media, and they could play a unique role in generating truly innovative journalism that connects with and serves various publics. Whether universities can break free of some of the institutional patterns that tend to trap them in passing along the approved canon instead of innovating and changing journalism, is an open question. Regardless, this experiment in collaboration will be an interesting one to watch.
See also Paul Conley and Bob Stepno on the schools left out.

: It's a good and healthy discussion and I'm eager to hear Jay Rosen pipe in.

May 30, 2005

Vive les blogs

: Stephen Baker reports, thanks to Loic Le Meur, that blogs were a factor in the French non to the EU constitution.

: I"m listening to the BBC's Up All Night now, before going on, and they're talking about just this.

Hoder, Wired

: Wired magazine's piece about our friend Hossein Derakhshan, by Jeff Howe, is now online.

Skypecasting

: It's not only podcasters who are using Skype for interviews, the BBC is... because it offers higher quality than a plain old phone line.

I'm going to be on the BBC's Up All Night sometime Monday night to blather on blogs and in the process of setting up, Kevin Anderson said they use Skype because it's so good. From his emails:

Yes, we're using Skype heavily. We recently conducted an interview with Mr Behi, an Iranian blogger, via Skype. It's very useful for us in that repressive governments can't block it due to its distributed nature. And seeing as on a good connection, it's a full 44Khz signal, it's just below the quality of the very expensive ISDN broadcast equipment we have.
Last week, I also picked up a copy of Focus, the German news magazine with a cover on "internet telephony for all," including Skype. I'm amazed that VOIP is a cover story. But then, why shouldn't it be: It's exploding the old networks and old ways.

How to share

: The BBC is offering discounts to freelancers for courses on how to do TV. The Beeb has been, perhaps, the most generous big-media operation -- with its expertise -- when it comes to training people how to do what they do. As has been reported previously, they are also looking at starting a journalism school.

Distributed reporting assignment desk: The transparency test

: This would be a great assignment for a distributed army of citizen reporters:

The Toronto Star sent reporters from across Canada into government offices to try to get documents to which citizens are entitled.

If somebody would organize it, that would be a good idea for bloggers to swarm the government across the country to see just how transparent it is: What if we all went to our own town halls, county offices, and/or state governments to request, say:
: Expense accounts of elected officials.
: Spending records on any given program (e.g., what cars government buys... when it should be buying Hyundais).
: School class size or testing performance.
: Crime statistics.

Then we could all post our reports with a standard tag -- e.g., transparency test -- that could be aggregated via Technorati and PubSub.

A news organization could be good at organizing such a distributed effort, because they could publicize the effort and set the standards and edit the results into a good story. But you don't need a news organization to handle this; anyone could. It's just that newspapers and TV news operations would be smart to try projects such as this as a way to expand their newsgathering.

Here's what the Star found:

Canadians seeking basic government information about class sizes, restaurant safety or police complaints are up against a culture of secrecy, a national audit of openness shows.

In the country's first-ever practical test of transparency, reporters visited city halls, police forces, school boards and federal government offices across Canada to test how bureaucrats administer laws protecting the public's right to government information. They found a confusing patchwork of policies across the country.

Officials handed over records to just one in every three requesters who came in person. The rest remained locked tight in government filing cabinets as applicants were told they had to file time-consuming — and often expensive — formal requests under provincial or federal access laws.

[via Bill Doskoch]

: In the comments, Larry Borsato corrects me to say this was a project across many papers in Canada. Could have just as easily have been across many citizens.

Posted

post1.jpg: Not sure why, but Howard Kurtz devotes part of his Washington Post column today to this very blog. I'm flattered and too egotistical to be too embarrassed.

(Just to clarify one thing about About, not that anyone should care: I'll be working as a consultant, part-time, and not on staff and that's how I can continue to blog. And, yes, I tweaked the deal at first but obviously signed onto the vision of it as a platform for distributed media, because that's why I'm there and, having met the staff, I'm happy as a clam in cocktail sauce.)

And here's my son's blog.

: OH, AND... If anybody's in D.C. and can save a copy of the Style section, I'd be grateful to see it in print. As I said: I'm an egotist and I may be blogboy now but I'm not so jaded I don't like seeing my name in print.

Vacation in Maine!

maine1.jpg: My wonderful sister has a wonderful riverfront home in Bath, Maine available for rental during the summer. Details:

Beautifully restored 100-year-old Saltbox on Kennebec in Bath; open-concept living room, dining and kitchen plus study (two sleepers); second floor two bedrooms, large bathroom; wrap-around deck; lawn down to dock and water. Available June 18 - October 29. High season (July 2 – August 31) $1200 per week; Off season $950 per week.
Go here for pictures and contact information.

May 29, 2005

A historic day: I agree with the French

: The French resoundingly defeated the European Union constitution. I didn't much like it when it came out. Says the International Herald-Tribune:

With nearly 83 percent of the votes counted, the French Interior Ministry said the no camp had 57.26 percent, compared with 42.74 for the yes....

Turnout was estimated at more than 70 percent, far exceeding other recent elections in France. The final figure was expected to surpass turnout in the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty 13 years ago that paved the way to the euro.

"It's a big no," said Bruno Jeanbart, director of political research at the CSA polling station. "It's a twin protest vote against the government and against Europe."

It's about trying to turn Europe in to a faux nation. It's about protectionism. It's about Europe thinking it is a world player when it is no longer. And it's about a bad constitution that made up for in bureaucracy what it lacked in vision.

The moderate revolution?

: Howard Kurtz writes that blog coverage of the moderate revolution was filled with anger from the right and left while mainstream media celebrated the moderation (as did I... apparently because I am either strange or mainstream, take your pick). He's onto something:

It was the perfect storm for the blogosphere, an issue on which both right-wingers and left-wingers could rise up in rare unison and smite the craven offenders.

Both sides hated, castigated and otherwise took a dim view of the last-minute deal this week that averted a nuclear showdown over Senate filibusters.

Let the mainstream media praise as bipartisan statesmen the mushy moderates who cobbled together the compromise. Many bloggers were infuriated, castigating the so-called Gang of 14 (and especially John McCain) as knaves and turncoats.

It was another reminder, as if one were needed, of the yawning gap between the establishment press, which loves moderates and moderation, and the cyberworld, which tends to be driven by partisan passions.

But I think that says more about the media than about the nation.

I do believe (because I want to) that the people prefer Congress to shut up and do its work and not fight from the fringes and that the people are inherently moderate -- or at least the wisdom of the crowd is -- and that's why no party takes over the country for too long (yet).

In that sense, I think, neither the blogs nor mainstream press reflect the people, who talk, think, fret, and argue about Congress a helluva lot less than either reporters or bloggers.

What this split in coverage really indicates, as Kurtz says, is the essential difference between big and citizens' media (and I'm repeating myself): because newspapers are institutional and blogs are personal, newspapers try to be dispassionate while blogs are passionate.

And that's what we see in the coverage of what I hope to call the moderate revolution: Blogs speak up when they have cause to be pissed about or to celebrate over but rarely to be moderate and thus dull. The big press has to cover the story and thinks it has to see both sides; it likes to show both sides yelling but, of course, it doesn't want to be caught yelling itself.

And, in the end, it's hard to get a red-faced rant in defense of moderation, compromise, and the middleground, though I'd like to try to figure out how.

May 28, 2005

Don't get well

: The Times of London reports that Iraqi murderer Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has fled to Iran with a fever after being injured by shrapnel in an American attack.

It's a conspiracy!

: Oliver Stone arrested on drug charges.

Blooks

: Steve Rubel has a good roundup of the smart ways Freakonomics was marketed via blogs. This will be one of the exhibits in my talk to Book Expo about blogs. Please continue to feed me more (and thanks for the comments here).

: LATER: Rex says: Don't be so sure.

Save the F man

: I am glad to see a movement swelling to save Arthur Chi'en, the hapless WCBS reporter who, not knowing he was on the air, asked a couple of bozos shilling for the Opie & Anthony show who were trying to mess up his report, "What's your fucking problem, man." Everyone writing about this, including Chi'en himself, first falls down saying that was stupid and regretable and wrong. But was it worth firing the man?

All he did was say fucking.

Have we come to the point in this country when we honestly think that a word that has lost all meaning, just a word, is going to cause the downfall of the nation and is worth a man's career?

Perspective, people!

What's offensive is that we let the offended run the world.

Well, now I'm offended. WCBS should not have buckled under to pressure -- anticipated pressure at that -- just because of one stupid word.

It is time to send a message back to the fringies and tell them that they have their priorities all out of wack.

A blogger named Sergio D. Caplan started a site to Save Arthur Chi'en with instructions for calling WCBS or just using this form; that's what I'm doing (though, amazingly, they don't have a link to send a message to the news department -- the one department that should be listening to the public!).

This week, Clyde Haberman wrote a column in The Times drawing attention to the issue this week and reporting that fellow reporters are dismayed and that the communications director of the transportion authority complained to the station. It's a cause.

So join me in writing to WCBS and defending not just Arthur Chi'en but sanity.

It is insane that you fire Arthur Chi'en for one simple, fucking word. It's just a word, people. You throw out a man's career. You buckle under to the fringe. You embarrass yourself. You insult your audience (what, you think we can't take care of ourselves?). Because of one fucking word. For shame. Bring back Arthur Chi'en!
: I STAND CORRECTED: He actually said, "What the fuck's your problem, man?" The stories about this were so coy, it was impossible to tell and I parsed it wrongly. For grammar, give me an F.

May 27, 2005

Security blog

: Rick Francona, a security analyst at MSNBC I've shared desk space with at the network, has a new blog on the Middle East and security.

Blogs and books

: I'm giving a talk at Book Expo, the big publishing convention, this week on how all the constituencies of the word biz can use citizens' media. I want to brainstorm about the ways that blogs can help authors, agents, publishers/editors, marketers, and retailers -- from finding new talent to writing books online with your audience to building a direct relationship with your readers to creating communities.

I'm eager to get any of your ideas for how blogs and books should interact. Please comment away. Thanks.

News exec blogs

: Scott Anderson, an online exec at Tribune (and a Howard Stern fan.... we have so much in common) has been blogging inside the venerable Tribune Tower but now his blog is public and it's on my RSS feed now.

So what they told you when you entered puberty was right...

: ...Viagra can cause blindness.

Future

: Yesterday, at a press conference to announce a new initiative to improve journalism education, Hodding Carter, head of the Knight Foundation, said:

The great dirty secret in journalism and journalism education is that we are inherently conservative in the way we do things.
Preach it, brother. Yes, change is feared and resisted. He also said:
What has struck me is not that things are changing but that the change is cascading... We are in the midst of an absolute revolution.
Amen.

The initiative is funded by Carnegie and Knight and involves five universities: Northwestern, USC, Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia. It will place journalism students at news organizations to work on reporting projects without the pressure of deadline or bottom lines -- this to be led by my friend, Merrill Brown. It will help establish programs in specialized journalism (e.g., science and engineering journalism at USC). And it will create a task force to speak out on issues in journalism.

Oprah and the terrorists

: Debbie Schlussel, conservative columnist and Howard Stern fave, writes a pretty damning indictment of Oprah's mollycoddling of terrorists: Schlussel says Oprah wants us to understand mass murderer Mohammed Atta and understand a Palestinian human bomb and not mention that the murderers in Beslan were Islamic but instead came from the mountains. Maybe if you gave the terrorists cars, Oprah, they wouldn't be mad anymore.

The future of newsgathering

: Ernie Miller sends us to a really wonderful post by Lenslinger, a TV cameraman who is watching himself be replaced by... us. He covers a media event (planned implosion of building; film at 11) and sees that "a new breed of onlooker rose up to record it":

I speak not of the swarthy camera pirate with his heavy lens and professional press pass, but of the mild mannered college professor with the brand new camera-phone, the smiley housewife with the shiny Sure-Shot, the cocksure columnist with a thesis already brewing in the laptop. They are more than erstwhile tourists. They are the rabid bloggers, the plugged-in pundits, the citizen press corps - whip-smart individuals whose very nature drives them to post pictures, links and commentary on the sudden collapse before the dust even finishes settling over once fertile ground.

From Tripod Row, the view’s indeed a little scary. Squinting civilians peering into tiny lenses, breaking bedrock principles of camera-handling with every unnecessary sweep and pan. No one expected the democratization of media to be pretty, but the attendant lens abuse is enough to break this cinematographer’s heart. But that ship has sailed, a nautical phrase as apparently outdated as Wide-Medium-Tight and Steady Sequenced Video. What use are lofty production values to the herky-jerky nature of today’s internet footage? Does proper composition really matter when the end product is viewed on a one inch screen? Of course it does - but only to us broadcast dinosaurs. This new hybrid breed of digital scribe gives little thought to such matters, instead relying on quick image uploads and push-button publishing to make up for his lack of camera acumen.

It’s enough to make those of us in the media scrum to talk of the End Times....

I could quote the whole post but instead go over to his site and read the rest.

Of course, this isn't just about TV video. This is about photography and audio and text and reporting. He's going through the ding-ding moment I went through, as a print guy, a few years ago.

I always said that when I was a critic, the only thing that separated me from the audience was that I got the stuff early (and couldn't skip over the bad parts). But now bloggers get books and tapes for review before release. So nothing would separate me as a critic from them as an audience; we're all us.

What separates a professional journalist from a journalist? Oh, that's what journalists of all stripes are fretting over. Training? Maybe. But if we could learn how to hold a camera steady or get a quote right, anybody could. EThics? Oh, I dislike that one; we all have ethics, even if don't have them enshrined in codes, and often those with the codes are the first to forget the essence of their ethics. Money? That's starting to flow to the just-plain people.

We all have the tools now. Ding, dong, the priests are dead. Jittery video at 11.

: MORE: Matthew in Australia watches the coverage of a woman charged with drugs in Bali and notes, similarly:

I mean, how many consumer-level video cameras and flipped-out LCD screens did you see hovering above the sea of journalists alongside the bulkier, broadcast-quality stuff? A lot! There was one Indonesian guy in a red shirt who, not weighed down by carry bags, lenses and boom mikes, was running after the police car with a video camera no larger than the size of his palm. And he was the only one keeping up! That's pretty full-on.

May 26, 2005

Defame this

: Oriana Fallaci has been charged in Italy with defaming islam and ordered to stand trial (though she lives in the U.S. and says she won't go to Italy for this farce, this attack on freedom of speech and thought).

A judge has ordered best-selling writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci to stand trial in her native Italy on charges she defamed Islam in a recent book.

The decision angered Italy's justice minister but delighted Muslim activists, who accused Fallaci of inciting religious hatred in her 2004 work "La Forza della Ragione" (The Force of Reason)....

In "La Forza della Ragione," Fallaci wrote that terrorists had killed 6,000 people over the past 20 years in the name of the Koran and said the Islamic faith "sows hatred in the place of love and slavery in the place of freedom."

State prosecutors originally dismissed accusations of defamation from an Italian Muslim organization, and said Fallaci should not stand trial because she was merely exercising her right to freedom of speech.

But a preliminary judge in the northern Italian city of Bergamo, Armando Grasso, rejected the prosecutors advice at a hearing on Tuesday and said Fallaci should be indicted.

Grasso's ruling homed in on 18 sentences in the book, saying some of Fallaci's words were "without doubt offensive to Islam and to those who practice that religious faith."

Is there an Italian law against defaming America?

Another damned conference

: I might have had conference envy with all the power gathered at the D confab but after reading this numbingly repetitive blather from panels about media and blogs, I'm glad I missed it. What these big guys need is an unconference where, as Dave Winer says, there is no panel, everyone is the panel, and the smart people in the room get to speak and not just listen.

: LATER: Bob Cox is properly pissed at Ana Marie Cox for biting the hand that fed her fame with blanket snarking at bloggers, of which she was one -- the most notorious one, in fact.

How many is many?

: Carl Bialik, the Wall Street Journal's number's guy, attacks the question of how many blogs there are. As Rex says, the bottom line is pretty much "a lot."

The estimates of the number of blogs worldwide ranges from 10 to 60 million. But the definition of blog varies, as well it should, since blogging tools are merely publishing tools and can be used to say and do most anything. The percentage of active blogs varies, as well it should, since some people have no lives and post all the time (and it's really hard to post when you do get a life, by the way) and others use it to update when updates are warranted and others try it out and move on. The estimates of the audience vary, as well they should, because there is no way to accurately count that today.

Bialik leaves out one important factor that must not be ignored: RSS. My Sitemeter stats say I had 340k pageviews in March but my server stats said I had 996k and the difference is mostly RSS (and things such as the page views I generate when I publish posts). But, of course, RSS is complicated because just because a feed is downloaded doesn't mean it's read (and what does it mean to read a feed vs. reading a post?).

If all this is only about bragging rights, it doesn't matter. Brag away. Debate at will. Who cares? The power of blogs is not about the total or the biggest (that so old-media-think, so mass) but instead about the rising volume of individual conversations.

BUT... if this is about advertising, then we do need to establish real numbers:

: We need to count those blogs who want to be counted -- those who say they are publishing.

: We need to put cookies up to get unique user counts and behavior (frequency) and demographics.

: We need to find the means, technical and definitional, to count RSS (probably at the post level).

: We need to measure the unique value of citizens' media, finding measures of influence and conversation-starting and such. (See the discussion Ross Mayfield and I had with others over, in Ross' words, the need to move past measuring impressions to measuring the impressed.) This is the unique value of citizens media -- it's about relationships, conversations, influence, not just about the coincidence of a word on a page (see: Google).

: We need to create the means to aggregate, share, and analyze this data so ad hoc networks of blogs can be found.

: We need an open-source ad call (I'll keep beating this drum) so that advertisers can serve and analyze ads on those networks.

: And then, so we can brag in Ad Age and get Carl Bialik to poke at the bragging, we will want to have some sense of the ad revenue and audience volume to this subset of blogs: namely, those that have a reason to be counted.

Flush

: The Washington Post -- appearing to rally 'round its corporate cousin, Newsweek -- plays up a story today about allegations of "Koran abuse" (what an amazing piece of newspeak that is) at Guantanamo. As near as I can tell, there's nothing new in this: the prisoner allegations have been around for sometime; this is a repetition of them through more documents. This will yield another round of political, media, ideological, and ethnic nya-nyas on both sides. Meanwhile, I wonder, is anybody in Iraq preparing a report on beheading abuse and Muslim-Muslim murder, otherwise known as "human abuse?"

May 25, 2005

The fruits of fame

: I change my career and get publicity and blog but what really impressed a (soon-to-be-former) coworker of mine is that I got a shout-out from Amanda Congdon.

Moving

: Dean Wright, Merrill Brown's successor as editor of MSNBC.com (who has done a good job there), is moving over to Reuters to head up development of its consumer services -- that is, news directly to us, not through client media outlets. As we ask how we're going to get commodity news in the future, this is one answer. The AP will have a different answer -- pulling together the news of its correspondents and members. I'm not sure which model will be better business.

The future of magazines?

: Mark Glaser has a roundtable discussion about the future of magazines with Jay Rosen, Joan Walsh, Nina Link, Samir Husni, David Abrahamson and me.

: Also, Heather Green called this weekend for a chat that ends up on her Business Week blog. I rambled (not thinking it'd end up as a transcript) but rambling is nothing unusual for me!

Mötley suit

: Motley
is suing NBC for banning them after Vince Neal used the F word:

In the latest twist in the broadening battle overdecency standards, the glam-metal band Mötley Crüe filed suit against NBC yesterday. The suit states that the network violated the group's free-speech rights and weakened its sales by banning it after Vince Neil, the lead singer, used an expletive on the air in a Dec. 31 appearance on "The Tonight Show."

The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Los Angeles, accuses the network of censoring the band to mollify a Federal Communications Commission that has been increasingly quick to levy steep fines for broadcasting indecent material on television and radio.

Well, too bad that the suit's absurd. NBC choses what to put and not put on the air -- it's called editing or producing, not censoring. Now I suppose one could argue that it's not their air, it's our air, so the band could sue to get on -- but, of course, that's ludicrous; that would end in every American getting 15 minutes of fame. Or I suppose the band could sue the FCC for creating this chill -- except the FCC didn't fine FCC and, besides, the F came out in the "safe harbor" for nastiness after 10 p.m. Still, I'm glad to see anybody go tilting against the windmill (read: broadcast tower) that is the FCC.

Behind the silence

: I have two incredibly stupid reasons for the radio silence here: (1) I'm doing too many months' worth of expense accounts, (2) I'm cleaning too many piles of old memoes out of my office. But it has to get done (here's why). I'll be back in a bit.

May 24, 2005

Whereabouts

: Wildly busy day. Good wine. Exhaustion. Later.

The moderate revolution

: I know it's too much to hope for, but how I do hope that we have the stirrings of a moderate revolution against the fringers.

The end of the filibuster standoff is a start. We know it worked because it pissed off people on both sides.

Next comes an effort to find a middle ground on stem cell research -- following the quite moderate opinions of Americans.

The majority of Americans, according to this poll, favor choice in abortions but compromise is rising there as the Democrats talk about parental notice, as the Supreme Court considers its first abortion case, and as John Podhoretz says that all a Republican has to do to win is to act prolife, even if insincerely. The real importance of Podhoretz's column is that a moderate Republican could win the nomination with just a little tapdancing.

I do believe that Congress jumped the shark. We see how pissed off Americans are at Congress.

There is a real opportunity for the middle to take the lead. I believe a moderate candidate who could make it through the primaries would win the White House. The only question is who.

Unshopping at the nonmall

: I've made many futureshock predictions that were bull and I thought this was one of them:

About five years ago, I sat with the boss and with Bob Lessin, damned smart VC, and predicted that some big retail outlets would be replaced by showrooms where you could see the merchandise that you could then buy online. The idea was that Amazon is efficient but isn't always satisfying -- you want to touch the stuff. And maintaining retail and local warehouse space and above all inventory may be convenient -- but it is expensive and inefficient. So for big-ticket items (furniture, cars, electronics) a showroom could beat a store. And in the post-mass-market world, where I believe that unique or niche merchandise will make a comeback (eBay v. Walmart), a showroom would be far more effective than trying to blanket the country with inventory.

Even I didn't fully believe what I was saying. It was theoretical, speculative, perhaps bull.

But now here's a story in The New York Times reporting on just such a showroom for online sales:

new shopping complex in Ohio will try to combine the convenience of online stores with the hands-on experience of browsing at a mall.

Sometime near the end of 2006, the complex, called Epicenter, is scheduled to open in Columbus at the Polaris Fashion Place. The nucleus of Epicenter will consist of two parts - the Buypod, a hand-held electronic device, and electronic kiosks located throughout the mall.

Under the concept, customers will enter the mall and register their credit card information, which will then be put into their Buypods. As customers browse merchandise, they can use their Buypod - which, as the name suggests, looks something like an Apple iPod - to scan the labels of items they want to buy.

Although a small number of items will available to take home, most orders will be sent directly to the warehouse, where they will be filled and shipped. The electronic kiosks will print receipts and can be used to cancel orders, if needed.

According to Anthony Lee, Epicenter's chief executive, Internet and catalogue retailers can use Epicenter to establish a place where their customers can feel, and in some cases try on, merchandise. The Epicenter design also offers the low overhead and reduced need for sales staff that online and catalogue retailers are accustomed to.

Retail has just begun to explode. And this will, in turn, continue to explode local advertising and media.

May 23, 2005

Stupidity averted

: So the filibuster meltdown option is avoided. And a good thing it is. I don't think the peopel would have tolerated political war and a congressional shutdown. Powerline is despondent; Hugh Hewitt is wondering whether to be depressed but the gray mood is bipartisan: Avedon at Atrios doesn't like it. Kos calls it limited victory. I call avoiding stupidity victory, myself. I call moderation virtue.

Nonblogger snarks

: Romenesko keeps trying to insist he's not a blogger but he sure sounds like one -- a snarky one at that -- with this link to the post below that mentions a Museum of Television and Radio Media Center event:

Don't you hate it when journalists get together and refuse to share their brilliant ideas?
Well, the rules aren't mine. But I wonder whether they would have gotten leaders of big organizations there with the promise that a snarky blogger (like, oh, Romenesko) was in their midst. I'm as transparent as we get -- so see-through I could wear the emperor's new clothes and you wouldn't notice (think about it) -- but even I have to acknowledge that sometimes, people get together to just talk without worrying about how they say what they say. This wasn't journalists meeting with officials off the record; this was journalists meeting with journalists about the business of journalism. And I will respect the rules of engagement. So I blogged my own thoughts, not those of others. When a commenter snarked below about a blogger attending an off-the-record session, I said that I have off-the-record meetings every day. They're called conversations. I didn't blog every meeting with my boss and we're both journalists. I don't blog every conversation with my wife because, well, as my father says, His mother didn't raise any idiot sons (think about it). I didn't blog about my new professional endeavors before it was time. Though I know that it may be hard to imagine, even for a bloggers, Some of life is simply off-the-record or, if you prefer, not for blogging or publication.

On the air

: On MSNBC's Connected at 5p re Newsweek's new unnamed sources policy.

: Imagine my surprise to see SF Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein sitting with Monica Crowley going over scripts; he's subbing for Ron Reagan tonight.

New business models for news

: The discussion that the news industry -- print, broadcast, online -- needs most today is not more blather about who and isn't a journalist but instead about how to pay for journalism.

I was lucky enough to go to a roundtable about the future of news last week at the Museum of Television & Radio. It was off-the-record, so I'm not supposed to quote anyone. But I was making notes for a catalogue of new business models for news. Some of this is about saving money -- for audience and ad revenue to big media are falling and will continue to fall. But some of this is about opening up and taking advantage of what's happening in technology and media to expand, to explode. Here's are a few buckets, each broad and abstract; please add more and fill them up with specifics:

: New sources: See the post below about gathering news from many sources, including those outside the newsroom. Whether it's hyperlocal news around the corner or news in far-off places where reporters can't go or assigning the entire audience to help with news (tell us your stories of waste about health insurance), there is tremendous untapped knowledge and energy "out there." News organizations cannot afford to expand staff but this is how they can expand coverage. Or to look at it another way: This process of the people publishing news will go on anyway; the question is whether the news organizations can get involved and add value with content, promotion, and education.

: Replacing anchors with authentic voices: Is it still worth the money to have expensive anchors on TV? They supposedly added trust to the news, though Dan Rather burst that balloon. They also supposedly put a human face on the news -- a voice. But they became so homogenized that they added no voice at all; they became background noise, Newsak. So imagine instead having various people giving us news with various perspectives. I don't know whether that would work; we still like consistency and this, too, can create expensive stars (see: Bill O'Reilly). But I believe that the explosion of news will lead to a lessened dependence on high-priced faces.

Look at it another way: Does every newspaper across the country need its own movie critic? The movies are the same coast-to-coast. The information we need to decide whether to go is the same. So why not plop in Roger Ebert? Or why not plop in reviews by your funny neighbor who knows the good stuff?

Ditto sports columnists. Ditto political columnists. Get rid of the voices on high and get more voices from down on the ground and you'll improve the conversation and save money.

: Death to commodified news: As an industry, we waste a fortune manhandling the same commodified news everybody already knows. But it's more than just a waste; it drags us down into an oppressive sameness. We all got overdosed on Schaivovision and Popevision and Bridevision. The programmers behind the cable news networks were afraid not to blanket those stories because their competitors were blanketing them. But by that act, they made themselves the same as their competitors, they turned themselves into commodities. Breaking away from the pack is extremely difficult and risky, but every news outlet needs to have a unique voice and value or it will get lost in a crowd.

Similarly, newspapers and their audiences would be best served concentrating on what they do best: local, local, local. If they gave us the local news that no one else could gather and report, they'd be worth more to us. But this, too, is a hard habit to break: not sending the 15,001st correspondent to the political conventions, not editing the already edited AP report, not printing the stock tables....

: Death to the masses: One-size-fits-all news was a product of the mass market and the mass market was an aberration brought on by a scarcity and thus hegemony of broadcast channels which, in turn, led to a scarcity of newspaper choices. The internet explodes the mass market and brings the press back to its natural state of choice. So does it still make sense to print those stock tables -- costing, say, $1 million a year in paper and ink -- when only a small portion of the audience still uses them? Can you afford to let those readers go -- on the off chance that they do cancel their subscriptions; can you afford not to? In the old mass-market days, you put a little of this and a little of that in your product to serve everyone, in little ways. Now maybe it makes more sense to have separate products -- news, sports, entertainment, lifestyle, business -- to serve those audiences in big ways... and serve targeted and efficient advertising as a result. The transition would be painful, in some cases fatal, but this is where the audience is now heading online.

: Anytime, anywhere, anyhow: There is no such thing as a medium anymore; it's all media, it's all multi. The public demands its news -- rather than waiting for it to be served -- anytime, anywhere, to serve any interest or need. So news organizations must do just that. Thus a newspaper needs to gather and share the news it knows anytime (which, I have learned, is far more difficult than it appears) via online and audio and video and the internet and phones (also not easy). Thus TV networks have had to hire people to write and package text online. And they need to be able attach sponsorship (or payment) to all this (and that's not easy, either: just try selling sponsorship of BitTorrent or ad on RSS).

: Charity: NPR is growing on the strength of its news and its audience contributions. I do believe the audience will pay for news in certain (limited) circumstances. And, yes, that does present a new bucket of church-v-state issues (e.g., how come we can get money only to report on why there isn't global warming vs. why there is?). But the same issues of journalistic integrity prevail (the answer is that you can pay to support reporting but not conclusions).

: Quality will out: One way or another -- with their eyeballs or their checkbooks -- the public will support quality, unique reporting. See 60 Minutes. See NPR. I have to believe that the best way to find news business models is to give people unique value and quality. Sounds obvious, doesn't it?

: Join the conversation: This is the most important one. The conversation that is news will be going on with or without you -- so better to be withit: Better to find the ways to stand in a position to gather and share news. So, for example, look at RSS feeds as a way to get your content out there and not only drive traffic back to your site and brand but also to be consumed and sponsored in a distributed manner.

: MORE: It so happens that The Wall Street Journal asks a bunch of smart media people about new business models for media today: free links here and here. Comments later.

My favorite line from the first Journal story:

"The newspaper of the future is going to be a coalition of niche products," says consultant S.W. "Sammy" Papert III.

Big radio on small radio

: NPR's Morning Edition did a segment on podcasting this morning and they interviewed me (sitting under William Paley's bookshelf at the Museum of Television and Radio, by ironic chance). They edited out plugs for podcast pioneers Dave Winer and Adam Curry (I swear it, Dave, on a stack of RSS manuals!). Take a listen here.

Editor as news gatherer

: I think we're getting ready to define a new job description of the journalist.

One of my favorite soundbites -- oh, I got a million of 'em -- is that we in the press need to think of ourselves not just as news creators but also as news gatherers, collecting news from inside and outside our newsrooms and sharing it wherever, whenever, and however people want.

Or to say it in another obnoxious soundbite: We need to stop being controllers and start being enablers.

I read Stephen Baker's post on the Businessweek Blogspotting blog recounting lunch at a Korean restaurant (note outsourcing irony) with a media exec who argued that we will soon the rise of a new kind of newsperson. They see it as a new kind of reporter.

I think it's a new kind of editor who gathers and sifts and vets and shares and guides and goads -- and does all that not just with beat reporters but with beat citizens: readers turned writers.

Baker and lunchmate think these people will be higher paid because of their multimedia skills. As editors, that may be true (though multimedia skills are today the birthright of the young: no big deal). As reporters, I think, however, that there will not be a scarcity of talent and eagerness out there -- witness the blogs -- and so payment for reporting could decline. From their lunch:

He said that the day of the classic "beat reporter," is coming to an end. Replacing the legions of beat reporters banging out their stories in newsrooms, he predicts, will be a far smaller group of so-called multimedia journalists. These people will be higher paid. They will know how to harvest the knowledge of experts and citizen reporters alike, and will fashion new journalistic products out of various media. They will have entrepreneurial skills and many will create their own brands....

In many ways, the trend he described to me (as we struggled with metallic chop sticks in a Korean eatery) mirrors what is happening in the software industry. There, many of the commodity jobs are moving offshore. The winners are those who can put together entire projects, who know how to manage cross-cultural teams, who understand the business and can deal with customers.

More and more, the winners in the industries I'm seeing are those who--inside or outside a company--can run their own show.

(Cue quotes from Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat.)

: So imagine the job description of a real city editor of the near future. Duties include:

1. Aggregate, organize, and highlight the best of newsroom and citizen media: good reporting, good story ideas, new viewpoints, public pulse points.

2. Make assignments inside and outside the newsroom: You need someone to cover a school-board meeting where there's a controversy brewing, you might allocate one of your staff reporters. For another meeting, you might go out to bid with citizen information entrepreneurs, picking someone who has your trust because she has training and a track record. For another meeting, you know that the event will be covered by citizens anyway -- some with a stated viewpoint -- and you'll aggregate those. But you'll make sure that what needs to be covered gets covered. The insiders will be on salary. The outsiders may get a payment or may be part of your company's ad network or may just get promotion that benefits them when they sell the ads.

3. Identify, train, and support reporting talent: What you have done in the newsroom, you will need to do outside. You will find promising and motivated citizen reporters and put the best into a company training program -- or take the best from journalism schools that now serve the industry and the public with citizen training. On an ongoing basis, you will work with this distibuted reporting base to improve their work. You won't be able to edit every line of every report to which you link, but you will try to educate them -- and earn their respect as they earn yours.

4. Share news anywhere, anytime, in any medium: You will package and enable news gatherers to share news as it happens in and through any appropriate medium -- text, photo, audio, video, conversation, shared resources.

5. Converse: It's important to stay in conversation with the community: Get out, meet people, read their blogs, read their comments, respond to them, be a member of the community.

Come to think of it, I know such a journalist. She's called the Barista.

May 22, 2005

Follow the money

: Two interesting jobs in PaidContent.org's listings, always a good source for industry intelligence:

: Yahoo: Manager of mergers and acquisitions. Lots of action there.

: Motorola: Director of business operations, iRadio: "Motorola is planning to make the mobile phone the center of a new music experience, combining high-speed internet access with Bluetooth technology to offer music anytime, anywhere.. The new service, called iRadio, will allow consumers to easily beam radio streams and personal collections to a nearby stereo system, whether in the car, home, or office."

: Coca-Cola: Interactive brand manager: Proving that interactive is about branding.

Some lesson in free speech and responsibility

: A high-school principal in Georgia has gone after the school's paper and now the students have blog telling their story. An AP story reports:

This school year's final edition of a high school student newspaper was killed and the school's journalism class was eliminated after the principal said the paper highlighted negative stories and a lack of thorough reporting. Randolph Bynum, principal of Pebblebrook High School in Cobb County, cut the class citing a teacher shortage and the need to keep more popular courses like cosmetology. But he also criticized the paper for negative stories at the expense of articles more favorable to the school's image, and for a lack of thoroughness in its reporting of stories on teen pregnancy and vandalism in the school parking lot.
Go to these PDF links and you will see that this is an impressive newspaper that, indeed, covers hard issues like teen pregnancy and gambling and even anti-evolution textbook stickers.

The principal, like any bureaucrat, is apparently allergic to transparency -- which is all the more reason why the student body and the community are well-served by this very good newspaper.

There could be no better lesson in the need for journalism.

But there's some hope: The school got a new principal last week. Here is her email address: Regina.Montgomery@cobbk12.org.

Journalists and bloggers alike should come to the aid of these good students and their teacher -- and free speech -- and send email to Ms. Montgomery. I have.

Congress sucks

: That's what I love about blogs: No mincing, dicing, slicing, saucing words. Congress sucks. That pretty much says it. They're going berserk over their pandering grandstanding and not paying attention to business and the American people hate them for it.

Sunday, David Brooks goes after not the left fringe or the right fringe but the wimpy middle for not bringing sense to the senseless and averting a nuclear meltdown:

As we descend down this path, the moderates are being serenaded for their valiant efforts to find a compromise. I'm all for valiant efforts, but why do the independent types always have to be so ineffectual? Why do they always have to play their accustomed role: well-intentioned roadkill?

The answer, to be blunt, is that some of the moderates are moderates out of conviction. They do have courage. But many moderates are simply people who feel cross-pressured by different political forces, and their instinctive response is to shrink from pressure. They lack spirit to take risks, to actually lead.

These 12 senators believe the looming nuclear showdown will be terrible for their institution. They had a deal within their grasp that would have headed this off, a deal that was just and fair: up or down votes for nominees and respect for minority rights. But as I write, they haven't been able to put it together.

No more sweetheart press for the responsible middle. Put up or shut up.

May 21, 2005

'What you call serendipity, we call links'

: Rafat Ali and I were at the same high-powered but off-the-record roundtable on the future of news media yesterday. It was a great session, I thought. And Rafat had one of the best lines of the day, which -- because he just blogged it himself -- I can now quote. The news people were voicing a commonly expressed concern that in this world of ours, without packaged, edited front pages and news-show rundowns, and home pages, for that matter, the reader/viewer/user loses serendipity: that is, the story you won't look for but an editor will tell you. Rafat's wonderful reply:

what you people call serendipity, we call links. What you people call the homepage, we call Bloglines. What you call indepth-reporting, we call blogging a story to death.

Snarkers

: Thanks for all the very nice comments, below, regarding my career move. Since I'm a lifelong wage slave and a chicken, it's especially appreciated. But blog will still be blogs and so there are snarky comments even on this topic (I can imagine some of these commenters snarking about pictures of a bloggers' new baby: "Ewwww, looks like Michael Moore!"). The snark:

So now you're a full-time hypester eh?

A classic case of jumping on a bandwagon without knowing what's really going on. But we live in an age of dilettantes and lightweights. 15-second attention spans demand 15-second pundits and prognosticators. I can just see Gladwell writing a retrospective on this craze in a year or two...

Well, actually, I'd say that Gladwell is just a craze.

The fight for "freedom"

: There are a few doozies in yesterday's architectural review by Nicolai Ouroussoff of the new International Freedom Center designs set for the World Trade Center.

But the experience soon becomes Orwellian. The center's upper-level galleries will be arranged in a spiral around the central light well. Under the current design, visitors will have to ride an elevator to the top and then walk back down along the spiral on a so-called "Freedom Walk." This kind of manipulation seems silly, especially in a museum that celebrates freedom. By echoing the ramps down into the memorial pools, the downward spiral implies a direct connection between the cataclysm of 9/11 and a global struggle for "freedom" - a bit of simplistic propaganda. (An early rendering of the Freedom Center that was circulated at the development corporation's offices included an image of a woman flashing a victory sign after voting in the recent Iraqi elections; that image has been replaced by a photo of Lyndon B. Johnson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)
Oh, I would say there is a most direct connection between "the cataclysm of 9/11 and a global struggle for 'freedom.'" We needn't put quote marks around "freedom" -- which is as good as saying "so-called freedom" -- when it comes to freeing people from the opression of the Islamic fanatics who did this deed and ruled Afghanistan and threaten people throughout the world. We need to fight for freedom from their terror and tyranny. That's not about "freedom." That's about freedom. In what world is extolling freedom is "Orwellian" "propaganda?"

And I'm offended by the substitution of a photo that more than symbolizes freedom in Iraq. That is precisely the photo that should be in a museum about freedom, damnit.

The review ends with this:

What is missing at ground zero is a sense of humility. This is something that cannot be remedied by reducing the scale of a building. We should refocus attention on what matters most: remembering the human beings who were lost at ground zero, while allowing life to return to the void there. The rest is a pointless distraction.
I don't understand the use of the word "humility" any more than I understand the use of the words "Orwellian" or "propaganda" in this setting -- and apparently no better than the critic understands the use of the word "freedom" in this context. Is "humility" a proxy for the notion that we should ask why they hate us? Let Bill Maher build that building. Or is this the notion that we should stand humbly before the sacrifice of so many good and innocent lives lost? In that case, I agree.

May 20, 2005

On the air

: On Kudlow at 5:45p ET and Hewitt at 7:20p ET today and on NPR Monday morning.

Onward

: I just quit my job at Advance.net to do lots of new things -- a damned career smorgasbord -- all related to changing news and to citizens' media:

: I'm going to work on content development About.com, on a consulting basis, working with Martin Nisenholtz at The New York Times Company, whom I've known and respected for more than 10 years now. What excites me today is the meeting of mainstream media and citizens' media and About at The New York Times Company is just that. But this is more than an old-media property buying into new-media (as I first saw it); it's more than smart diversification (which the news business needs). About.com can be a platform for distributed media and I'm eager to explore all the great things that will come of that. But first, I'm looking forward to working with the amazing army of About guides, who have created a great resource of content and service online. I'm doing this part-time, as a consultant, so I'll be free to continue blogging and doing other things, including:

: I will act as editor in chief of a new news start-up founded by Upendra Shardanand (ex Firefly, Microsoft Passport, AOL, and Time Warner) and a sterling team. More than a year ago, when Upendra first described his idea to me, I lurched at it. I was so determined to work on this that I gave up plans to start my own blog company. The start-up remains in stealth mode -- this is the first public mention of it -- but you'll hear more about it soon. (And we are, of course, hiring engineers.)

: I got a chance to write the new media curriculum for the new City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, collaborating on it with Dean Stephen Shepard (former editor-in-chief of Business Week), Merrill Brown, Judy Watson of CUNY, and more faculty there. I will continue to work with CUNY as the school launches and I can't wait until fall 2006, when the school welcomes the generation of students who will shape the future of news.

: I am hanging out my consulting shingle to take on a few good projects. The first: I'll continue to work with Advance.net on a magazine/online assigment. I've joined a few advisory boards. And maybe I can even get paid for the occasional speech. I am now Buzzmachine LLC.

: I have a book I'm finally ready to start writing and I'm thinking about writing some of it here on this blog.

: And, of course, I will blog -- blog more, I hope. Blogging has changed my career and opened all these doors. I've learned a tremendous amount (or think I have) about the future of the press thanks to the conversation I've had here with you all. So thank you. I will continue the conversation and continue learning and changing my old ideas about media until somebody pries my laptop off my cold, dead lap.

Because I'll be working with the Times Company, I'll usually refrain from blogging about their business and policies, just as I did when it came to Advance's business at Conde Nast and its newspapers (apart from the occasional plug for hyperlocal... and I swear, I never fed Gawker any Conde elevator reports). In the interest of full disclosure, this is why I did not blog about (or answer a few interview requests regarding) The Times' new TimesSelect premium service. So have I sold out to The Man? Of course, I have. I did that more than 30 years ago, when I went to work for my first newspaper. You should always judge what I say about big media in the context of fact that big media bought the suit I wear (and a damned nice suit it is, thank you).

Now allow me to say a few things about Advance.net and my boss, Steve Newhouse, who is a real visionary and strategic thinker in the press and new media. It's because of Steve's enthusiasm for community that we opened our newspaper-related services to interactivity more aggressively than any other publisher I know. I'm proud that a great staff at Advance -- led by my friend and colleague from Entertainment Weekly, Peter Hauck -- built the top news sites in every one of the company's markets. I'm also glad that I got to work on the start of CondeNet's Epicurious, Concierge, and Style with Rochelle Udell, Joan Feeney, and other creative editors. I have the highest respect for the Newhouse family and their company and I'm delighted that I'll continue to work with them.

Thanks for indulging me my little bit of personal news. Now back to blogging....

Where is the outrage? (continued)

: Tom Friedman says we are not demanding outrage from Muslim leaders and the White House over Muslims murdering Muslims. I would add the press and the liberal establishment to his list of those who should be expressing outrage. And, yes, we need to express outrage -- and surely will express outrage -- at the same time about prisoner abuse that went beyond naked pictures or toilets to death in today's Times report from Afghanistan.

"Look," he says the White House (and others) should say, "Newsweek may have violated journalistic rules, but what jihadist terrorists are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan - blowing up innocent Muslims struggling to build an alternative society to dictatorship - surely destroys the Koran. They are the real enemies of Islam because they are depriving Muslims of a better future. From what I know of Islam, it teaches that you show reverence to God by showing reverence for his creations, not just his words. Why don't your spiritual leaders say that?

Sci-cry

: Over my years as a critic, one lesson I learned is that sci-fi fans are, uh, sensitive. I've never been forgiven for giving Babylon 5 a bad review. I got zapped every time I was unPC (or is that unSci?) enough to say Trekkie instead of Trekker. And I hurt a Star Wars fan who wants to explain that I was mean to make fun of geeky people who give up homes, civilization, and showers to spend weeks living on line to see a movie. Lighten up, guys, it's not the end of the universe.

The new imperialism

: Blogs continue to spread across big media. A few German blogging friends email to report that NetZeitung, the pioneering net-only newspaper, is taking up blogging.

May 19, 2005

Media links

: I'm at a media talkfest Friday and often get asked for blogg links; here's a link to some. Plus my media category.

News without newspapers?

: Doc Searls comes out with on-the-spot insights that abstract and summarize big trends with the clarity a new pair of glasses brings and he does it with the ease and frequency with which Howard Stern farts.

At the Syndicate conference this week, I was standing next to Doc and a fellow media executive who was saying what all us media executives say all the time: We need to find the business models that will support quality journalism.

Without missing a beat, Doc says, "You need to come up with business models that support news without newspapers."

Exactly. You needn't take that as a literal prediction -- though some will -- to find truth and value in that. We need to look at a world in which support from classified, retail, and national advertising will leak or pour out and in which the audience goes wherever it wants to go.

We need to rethink about newsrooms as news-gathering (not just news-creating) operations that bring together the community's news and share it wherever, however, and whenever the community wants. And, yes, we need to think of new business models to support this.

Calling all cars

: Wow.

Go look at the amazing ChicagoCrime.org, which takes feeds of data on crimes throughout the city and plots them on GoogleMaps by neighborhood and type and even provides RSS feeds for crimes reported on every police beat and block.

When I started in this online biz, lo, more than a decade ago, this was one of the blue-sky ideas we always heard would be so cool. Well, once data is in a data base and somebody can get a feed of it and parse it, the cool is possible.

This is the hyperlocalest of hyperlocal news. [via Lost Remote]

: And I shouldn't be surprised that the genius -- and I mean genius -- behind this is Adrian Holovaty, who's changing media and the world from Kansas.

When editors and politicians are customer-service representatives

: I spent the afternoon yesterday with Craig Newmark, always a delightful trip. And during various conversations, he unfailingly makes reference to customer service. People usually react as to a punchline when the founder of the incredibly successful Craigslist says he is founder and customer service representative. But for Craig, it's not a joke. It's a creed.

Rory O'Connor does a great job capturing that view from Craig's Q&A at the Personal Democracy Forum:

What’s behind its amazing, word-of-mouth success? “We provide a simple and effective community service,” explains Newmark. “We are persistent about basic values, and establishing a culture, systems and structures of trust and goodwill.”

Sounds simple enough. So why isn’t there a “Craigslist for Politics” yet? According to Newmark, it’s because there’s a lack of trust in our political system. “At Craigslist, we view customer service as a high expression of moral values,” he noted. “People are looking for institutions that reflect their values. Our political parties are not service organizations.”

Of late, Newmark added, he has been looking into media rather than politics. “News operations must also deal with issues of morals and trust,” he said. “We need better, more moral and trustworthy information.”

So what would a Craigslist for news be? It would be about trust. It would be about service.

The story is the story

: Amazing how anything can split and anyone can spit along party and ideological lines, even about Newsweek's incompetent and dangerous journalistic mistake. I was talking about that with Jay Rosen just last night: about how his criticism of Newsweek's error has earned him attacks from the left.

Isn't this story about journalism, not ideology? For some, though, nothing is not about ideology.

David Brooks does well summarizing the ideological perspectives and pissing on the Newsweek affair.

...Every faction up and down the political spectrum has used the magazine's blunder as a chance to open fire on its favorite targets, turning this into a fevered hunting season for the straw men.

Many of my friends on the right have decided that the Newsweek episode exposes the rotten core of the liberal media....

Meanwhile, the left side of the blogosphere has erupted with fury over the possibility that American interrogators might not have flushed a Koran down the toilet....

This, too, is unhinged. Would it be illegal for more people on the left to actually be happy that a story slurring Americans may turn out to be unproven?...

Then I click my mouse over to the transcripts of administration statements and I can't believe what I'm seeing. We're in the middle of an ideological war against people who want to destroy us, and what have the most powerful people on earth become? Whining media bashers.

Whining media bashers? How about dissatisifed media consumers? How about disappointed fellow journalists? How about unhappy fellow Americans?

Brooks is right to say that it's silly and offensive to bash Newsweek and not bash the fanatical murderers who used this report as an excuse to kill.

But I think he's wrong not to bash Newsweek himself, not to also criticize the magazine for making such an irresponsible error.

Brooks spends a paragraph saying that he used to work at Newsweek and he likes those guys and doesn't believe they're commies and that's very nice.

But by not criticizing the report, the net message of this otherwise spot-on column is that press people defend press people, that we circle our wagons around our screw-ups, that we stick together first. Especially today, with the press' trust in tatters, that is the wrong message.

What we should be saying is that we criticize each other first and we accept those criticisms first because we want to get to the truth together.

When the still-surprisingly-employed Dan Rather screwed up with his memoes -- and after my readers here forced me to comment on that as a media story not a political one -- Rosen and I were pointed to as liberals who criticized Rather along with the conservatives. That may have been apparently factual but it was the wrong conclusion: We were journalists criticizing journalists because we should.

What a relief

: No more stories about dorky Star Wars losers without lives waiting in line for a damned movie.

May 18, 2005

Fight! Fight!

: Denton v. Roshan.
: UPDATE: The full Denton report.

It's a joke

: NY Times critic Alessandra Stanley gets all PC about Two and a Half Men, a sitcom I happen to like. If she were merely unamused, that'd be one matter. But she's offended in a way that's laughable in itself: It's funny when people get all PC and haughty about jokes. She calls it not merely unfunny, in her view, but "hateful" and "ghastly" and why? Because Charlie Sheen shtupps:

But actually, the show is alarmingly anachronistic: it has been decades since a libidinous cad seemed harmless or endearing; in the age of H.I.V. and S.T.D.'s, Charlie's heedless promiscuity seems like a health risk, not a hobby.
Get rid of drunks, fat people, and the stupid in sitcoms; they're not allowed to be funny and we're not allowed to laugh at them. We're supposed to disapprove instead. And if the women aren't all role models -- if there's a mom, as there is in this show, who's screwed up and screwed up her sons, that' is "misogynistic."

It's a sitcom. It's a joke. Sorry you don't think it's funny. I do. But don't be making me into a hateful, ghastly, STD-spreading, mysogynist if I laugh.

Free pays

: The Wall Street Journal has appointed Carl Bialik -- aka the Numbers Guy who does a great job tearing down funny math in media -- to a new post as the free-content editor. For months now, WSJ.com, under nice-guy Bill Grueskin, has been sending links to freed-up content to bloggers and it has worked so well they've now instituted it as a job.

Where is the outrage?

: Tom Friedman asks the right question and brings the right perspective to the Newsweek nonstory story: If that could cause riots and deaths and condemnations and fatwas, then why are we not seeing such outrage over Muslim killing Muslim in Iraq?

That said, though, in the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month - most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.

Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia....

The best way to honor the Koran is to live by the values of mercy and compassion that it propagates.

: LATER: This is what gives me hope: Saudi Jeans says Friedman is right.

Dan Rather dodges bullet

: When he left his anchor chair -- or rather was pushed overboard -- CBS said that Dan Rather would continue as correspondent for 60 Minutes Wednesday. Now that's canceled. Is Dan canceled? Nope. He'll contribute to 60 Minutes Sunday.

Whereabouts

: Sorry I've been away, friends. Been crazed in meetings all day. Big changes on the horizon; more as soon as possible. Back blogging as soon as possible.

May 17, 2005

Bad timing

: What a rotten week Jon Stewart picked to take of