Spinning and Being Spun: The Idea of Journalism in a Postmodern Age

In memory of a world-changing journalist and photojournalist

Dith Pran in many ways defined what it means to be a "citizen journalist," and as a result, he's part of the reason we know anything about one of the most horrific stories of our age.

I remember when "The Killing Fields" first came out. The actor who played Dith Pran (Dr. Haing S. Ngor, who died in 1996) won the Academy Award, in many ways, because of the incredible heroism of the man and the true story behind the film role.

Link: Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65 - New York Times.

Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: March 31, 2008

 Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously
used to press for his people’s rights, died on Sunday at a hospital in
New Brunswick, N.J. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation. His credo: Make no move unless there was a 50-50 chance of not being killed.

He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists.

Mr. Schanberg wrote about Mr. Dith in newspaper articles and in The New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.) The story became the basis of the movie “The Killing Fields.”

The film, directed by Roland Joffé, showed Mr. Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing S. Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr. Schanberg to keep reporting the news. He believed that his country could be saved only if other countries grasped the gathering tragedy and responded.

But despite his frantic effort, Mr. Schanberg could not keep Mr. Dith from being sent to the countryside to join millions working as virtual slaves.

Mr. Schanberg returned to the United States and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia. He accepted it on behalf of Mr. Dith as well.

For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators. His brother had been. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith escaped over the Thai border on Oct. 3, 1979. An overjoyed Mr. Schanberg flew to greet him.

“To all of us who have worked as foreign reporters in frightening places,” Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said on Sunday, “Pran reminds us of a special category of journalistic heroism — the local partner, the stringer, the interpreter, the driver, the fixer, who knows the ropes, who makes your work possible, who often becomes your friend, who may save your life, who shares little of the glory, and who risks so much more than you do.”

[...]

In an e-mail message on Sunday, Mr. Schanberg recalled Mr. Dith’s theory of photojournalism: “You have to be a pineapple. You have to have a hundred eyes.”

“I’m a very lucky man to have had Pran as my reporting partner and even luckier that we came to call each other brother,” Mr. Schanberg said. “His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too. My reporting could not have been done without him.”

[...]

In the early 1970s, as unrest in neighboring Vietnam spread and Cambodia slipped into civil war, the Khmer Rouge grew more formidable. Tourism ended. Mr. Dith interpreted for foreign journalists. When working for Mr. Schanberg, he taught himself to take pictures.

When the Khmer Rouge won control in 1975, Mr. Dith became part of a monstrous social experiment: the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from the cities and the suppression of the educated classes with the goal of re-creating Cambodia as an agricultural nation.

To avoid summary execution, Mr. Dith hid that he was educated or that he knew Americans. He passed himself off as a taxi driver. He even threw away his money and dressed as a peasant.

Over the next 4 ½ years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.

In November 1978, Vietnam, by then a unified Communist nation after the end of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones.

The Vietnamese made him village chief. But he fled when he feared that they had learned of his American ties. His 60-mile trek to the Thai border was fraught with danger. Two companions were killed by a land mine.

[...]

At his death, Mr. Dith was working to establish another, still-unnamed organization to help Cambodia. In 1997, he published a book of essays by Cambodians who had witnessed the years of terror as children.

Dr. Ngor, the physician turned actor who had himself survived the killing fields, had joined with Mr. Dith in their fight for justice. He was shot to death in 1996 in Los Angeles by a teenage gang member.

“It seems like I lost one hand,” Mr. Dith said of Dr. Ngor’s death.

Mr. Dith nonetheless pushed ahead in his campaign against genocide everywhere. 

“One time is too many,” he said in an interview in his last weeks, expressing hope that others would continue his work. “If they can do that for me,” he said, “my spirit will be happy.”

Tear down those news site firewalls!

Link: Advertising Age - MediaWorks - Paid Content on the Net? Not if the Content's News.

Funny how the numbers do not lie, about the lack of viability of these subscription model walled garden anachronisms online.

But the real question is, why were such stupid decisions made in the first place? There were plenty of reasoned arguments, well-supported, that should have been more than persuasive, not to mention the chorus of disapproval on the Internets.

My thought is that, regardless of those arguments, regardless of the widespread disapproval, it was all about a power struggle over who would dictate the terms in the politics of deep structure interfaces online, just as surely as Microsoft and browsers and Google are now fighting over what OS layer is really the "desktop."

If subscriptions and walled gardens held the day, Old Media could crow that the new boss was same as the old boss, and continue guarding and coveting its gatekeeper role at the choke points of information dissemination and analysis.

But if forced to capitulate to the predominant ethos of the web, it would mean control of the discourse of the day had been wrested away from Old Media by force, by populist force. The hilarious part is the fact that populist forces carrying the day was such a "radical" idea back then.

Most of us online never doubted it. But what actually goes on inside the heads of those who do?!

Sure, many of those past nay-sayers will point to the collapse of online advertising revenue in the dot.com bust as the reason for their ridiculous pay-to-play models. But the main reason that collapse hit as hard as it did was that the banner ad was hopelessly tied to pre-conceived assumptions that the ads HAD to be tied to click-thrus and conversions, that somehow eyeball exposure and branding meant nothing if a direct link from THIS ad to THAT sale could not be traced.

What utter bullshit. Print, radio, and TV advertising were never held to such a high standard, yet they continue to command big ad budgets (albeit shrinking, as the ad money river now flows more and more online)

And the primary reason the online ad market is booming now is that a different model of what online advertising can be has started to sink in. Google was the visionary through the hard times, and for quite a while, it was the lonely visionary.

Now everyone dreams of Google's electronic sheep.

Link: Advertising Age - MediaWorks - Paid Content on the Net? Not if the Content's News.

Paid Content on the Net? Not if the Content's News

CNN, Economist Take Down Walls Online; WSJ and NYT Could Be Next

By Nat Ives and Abbey Klaassen

Published: August 13, 2007

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The experiment in paid content is over. No sale.

Charging for web content looked pretty promising back in 1996, when the pioneering new web magazine Slate was gearing up to try just that. "Our belief is that the medium will prove itself over time and people will pay for it," said John Williams, the founding publisher.

Chris Neimeth, senior VP-publisher at Salon

He never got a chance to test that proposition; he quit for Starbucks two months after launch. Then Slate made its move -- but lasted only a year before going free again in February 1999. Now there's a crescendo of similar falling walls at serious news sites -- including The Economist and CNN -- and the likelihood that the websites of both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal will soon be free.

Advantage of free
Even those that still plan to charge for content recognize that the free model has its benefits. This March, Slate rival Salon hiked prices on both its paid-subscription plans, but not because it saw paid content as the way forward. It raised rates the most for its ad-free subscription and raised them less for a subscription tier that includes some ads.
[...]

Two days after Salon's move, The Economist outright demolished a decade-old pay wall around much of the content on Economist.com. The paid-content plan had been intended to protect the print edition, but its pricing system was too complicated for consumers and, more important, it restricted traffic and time spent on the site. In June, after dropping the fees, unique visitors to Economist.com beat the previous June by 12%, the magazine said.

'Reaching true scale'
Then last month, CNN.com replaced its pay-to-play Pipeline video-news service with a free, ad-supported video player. "As popular as the service was," a CNN blog post explained, "it became clear to us that reaching true scale was gong to be impossible if the product remained as a pay service."

"Everyone started out thinking, 'OK, we'll sell some subscriptions and sell some advertising,'" said Ken Doctor, president of the Content Bridges media consultancy and a former VP for content services at Knight Ridder Digital. "Now the content world is becoming almost entirely ad-monetized."

The extent of the paradigm shift became really clear this June, when Rupert Murdoch fantasized to Time magazine, even before Dow Jones had accepted his $5 billion bid to buy it, about ending The Wall Street Journal's print edition and opening the gates to its online edition. During a News Corp. conference call with analysts last week, Mr. Murdoch reiterated that going free is very much on the table.

[...]

Then there's TimesSelect, the nearly two-year-old attempt by The New York Times to simultaneously monetize online readership and prop up print circulation. Its middling results, neither validation nor failure, strongly suggest that very few content publishers should even consider playing in the pay arena. And when the New York Post reported last week that the Times itself had decided to ax its tollbooth, the paper wasn't exactly quick to shoot down the story. "We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com," a spokeswoman said, declining to say anything further.

"When the first bubble burst in 2001, 2002, the people who said that free access wouldn't work said, 'Ha, we told you,'" said Rafat Ali, publisher and editor of PaidContent.org. "Then the advertising market came back. And you know where the industry is right now."

[...]

The more, the better
None of that is compelling enough to support paid content in most situations, said Jeff Marshall, senior VP-digital managing director at Starcom/Pixel. "From a marketer perspective, the big reason for moving something like TimesSelect or Dow Jones is you potentially create greater scale for advertisers, and they want as much scale as possible," he said. "Fortune 1000 companies want to move a lot of products, and the more people you can reach in desirable audiences, the better."

[...]

As it turns out, buying online news is certifiably low among consumers' priorities. In a 2007 study by Frank N. Magid Associates, only 4% of surveyed adults 18 to 64 said they had paid a separate fee to read news online, on par with paying for sports information and online genealogy services. Fantasy sports ranked a little better, but at only 7%. Entertainment content performed fairly well, with 16% of respondents saying they'd paid something extra to get it. But even that area got fewer buyers than background and credit checks; dating services; adult entertainment; technical support such as spam filters; and games, the No. 1 category where people will pay to play.

Web publishers are also getting a handle on the math. Online ad spending in the U.S. grew from $6 billion in 2002 to an estimated $16.8 billion last year -- and is likely to top $35 billion by 2011 even as its rate of growth slows, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. By comparison, ad spending in U.S. consumer magazines grew from nearly $11 billion in 2002 to an estimated $13.4 billion in 2006 -- with a projected 2011 haul of $16 billion.

[...]

Behind the scenes in tech magazine-land

This story speaks volumes. Written by Kim Zetter.

Link: PC World Editor Quits Over Apple Story - Epicenter - Wired Blogs.

PC World Editor Quits Over Apple Story

Colleagues at my former outlet, PC World magazine, have told me that Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly today because the company's new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs.

The piece, a whimsical article titled "Ten Things We Hate About Apple," was still in draft form when Crawford killed it. McCracken said no way and walked after Crawford refused to compromise. Apparently Crawford also told editors that product reviews in the magazine were too critical of vendors, especially ones who advertise in the magazine, and that they had to start being nicer to advertisers.

Crawford was former CEO of MacWorld and only started at PC World about a month ago. According to the PC World source, when Crawford was working for the Mac magazine, Steve Jobs would call him up any time he had a problem with a story the magazine was running about Apple.

"Everybody is so proud of Harry but we're devastated that he's gone," said the source. "This is no way to run a magazine. But unfortunately, this looks like an indication of what we've got in store (from the new boss)."

He added that everyone at the magazine was upset by the news. "There's supposed to be a party with the MacWorld people going on right now, but no one's going," he said.

The source didn't know the specifics of what was in the story Crawford wanted to kill but said it was nothing new. "It was supposed to be light fare, just really innocuous stuff. The same kinds of things people have said about Apple before -- things that teased Steve Jobs," he said.

I reached McCracken on his cell who, from the sound of the background noise, seemed to be leaving the MacWorld party as we talked.

[Full Disclosure: Harry's my former boss at PC World and someone I greatly respect. He's a top-notch writer and one of the smartest editors I've worked with.]

He didn't want to discuss the details of why he resigned but said he quit "because of some fundamental disagreements with Colin." He emphasized that he wasn't fired or forced out and holds no ill feelings toward the company.

[...]

What hath Topix wrought?

Will be interesting to see, eh? Will it be an OhMyNews for US audiences, finally?

From reading Skrenta's blog, I see they sure threw a lot of research at the subject, honest, really want to know research, not that wanker research that is designed only to bolster something some exec already decided by fiat (you know, like most of the Nielsen ratings machine and focus-group-land for the entertainment industry).

It was odd, because I really discovered Topix back-asswards. Meaning, I wonder if anyone actually started on the Topix site as an actual reader. I got there from following my site tracking software referrals backwards, and Topix kept coming up. I was never sure if that was a compliment or not, because the site looked a lot like other spammy scraper sites. But it wasn't, really, so like Skrenta says, I couldn't tell what it was, just that it was throwing me traffic, mostly any time I mentioned a place name or a celebrity on one of my blogs.

Link: Topix reinvents itself as citizen journalist site | CNET News.com.

Topix reinvents itself as citizen journalist site

News aggregator redesigns its home page, encourages volunteers to  contribute and edit features.

Screenshots: The new Topix Elinor Mills  

  Published: April 1, 2007, 9:01 PM PDT  

Topix is reinventing itself from a software-based news aggregator site to a citizen journalist hub where anyone can submit news and photos and sign up to be a volunteer editor selecting featured stories.

[...]

 

Topix is following the user-powered models of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project (ODP) of Web links in which volunteers are responsible for creating and editing entries. Topix will avoid the spam problem that sites like Digg have by requiring people to sign up with their real names, said Rich Skrenta, chief executive officer. Skrenta is co-founder of the ODP.

Anyone can submit local news by ZIP code through the Web site or from their cell phone. The citizen journalist idea came to executives after they unearthed hidden in the site's forums a posting from a Texas Minuteman of his first-person experience patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border, something that wasn't published anywhere else, Skrenta said.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which launched as a mainstream news aggregation site in 2004, hit a plateau last year. It reached 10 million monthly unique visitors, putting it in the top 25 news sites, but users typically visited few pages and weren't sticking around long, Skrenta said. Allowing for more interactivity will create more stickiness on the sites, which is what makes social networks and other social media sites attractive to advertisers.

[...]

Murdoch admits he tries to sway public opinion for political purposes

Pretty disquieting, even if he does think his efforts were less than successful.

Link: Crooks and Liars: Rupert Murdoch admits manipulating the media…Surprise…Surprise.

Link: Hollywood Reporter: Murdoch: Big media has less sway on Internet.

Murdoch: Big media has less sway on Internet

By Georg Szalai

Jan 27, 2007

NEW YORK: Big media companies and governments ultimately can't stop or reverse their reduced agenda setting power brought about by the Internet and digital media, but must learn to live with it and embrace it as an opportunity, a panel at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland said Friday.

Big media conglomerates have less influence amid the continued explosion of news sites, blogs and podcasts, News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said in the session moderated by Charlie Rose and available via Webcast. "It's so pluralistic," Murdoch said. "We all have less power, much less...(we) the big companies."

Not only are there many more places from which to get news and opinion thanks to the Internet, he said. He said traditional media are also "put right immediately" these days when making mistakes, citing the example of the CBS News affair surrounding allegations against president George Bush last year.

Similarly, Murdoch said "government now has to be much more open" because of the Web and suggested, along with Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer and the possible future prime minister of the U.K., that governments should try to see it as an opportunity for them.

"We just have to let this go," Murdoch said. "We can't reverse it."

Asked if his News Corp. managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq, Murdoch said: "No, I don't think so. We tried." Asked by Rose for further comment, he said: "We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East...but we have been very critical of his execution."

The News Corp. CEO also once again signaled that he sees much more change ahead thanks to digital media. "We're in the very early stages of it," he said.

[...]

Juan Cole rakes Murdoch over the coals pretty good.

Link: Informed Comment.

Rupert Murdoch, who gives you Bill O'Reilly, Daniel Pipes, and other fantasists of the hard Right, by his ownership of a vast media empire, admitted at the Davos conference that his companies had "tried" to propagandize for Bush's Iraq War. He said that they were critical of the execution of the war, though. He doesn't watch or read his own media if he thinks that. It is never a discouraging word and 'what were the RNC talking points today?' over there in Foxland.

Murdoch's remarks are a good reason for which the news conglomerates should be broken up so that a wider range of views can be published. While Murdoch complains about competition from the internet, the fact is that far more people watch television than get their news from any blogger.

Murdoch's media have done more to cheapen American values and drive the country toward fascistic ways of thinking than anything since the McCarthy period in the 1950s. The airwaves belong to the public, and this man only licenses them. When will the public take them back and use them for purposes of which Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin would have approved?

 

TVNewser's Brian Stelter is Media Web's Online Journalist of the Year - MarketWatch

This guy earns every accolade he gets. His success is simply an amazing story, and his blog is at the top of my "must-read" list, and has been for several years.

Link: TVNewser's Brian Stelter in the Online Journalist of the Year - MarketWatch.

JON FRIEDMAN'S MEDIA WEB

TVNewser's Stelter is Online Journalist of the Year

Commentary: He's THE TV news authority - at, yes, the ripe old age of 21

By Jon Friedman, MarketWatch

Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Dec 15, 2006

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Brian Stelter, the founder and leader of TVNewser.com, is a star in the blogosphere.

In the television news industry, Stelter is often a first read for people who want to know what and how their colleagues and competitors are doing at that minute. Because TVNewser.com has had so much impact, Stelter is Media Web's Online Journalist of the Year.

That's only part of his saga. He is also one of the most improbable success stories around today. He is a solid professional at a point when most of his peers are learning the craft by writing for their campus publications. If his counterparts were really lucky, they'd be freelancing as university correspondents for the local big-city dailies.

You see, the most remarkable aspect of Stelter's success is that he is only 21 years old. Stelter attends Towson University in Maryland (where he has edited the school paper, to boot).

Stelter is the rarest kind of media blogger. He is respected for his knowledge of the industry and the serious subjects that he writes about. Stelter provides useful information to an adult audience. Plenty of other bloggers get their kicks by cranking out mean-spirited gossip.

[...]

Loyal following

Stelter founded the blog in January 2004, originally using the name CableNewser.
While he is half the age of many of his sources and readers, he has steadily built a loyal following of some of the biggest names in the TV biz.

TVNewser.com has about 250,000 unique visitors and 900,000 page views a month and it receives some 200 emails a day from anonymous tipsters and people who like to scream and yell their opinions.

Fans appreciate that Stelter's blog gets right to the point and presents crisp headlines, always concentrating on providing information, not mindless quips.

"You'd think he was doing this for 10 or 20 years," Dorian Benkoil, mediabistro.com's editorial director, noted.

 

"He gets scoops that most beat reporters don't," said Laurel Touby, the CEO of mediabistro.com, the Internet empire that acquired TVNewser two years ago.

[...]

 

Interesting NBC/MSNBC news items on TV Newser

I don't know if I see a trend here or not, but it certainly is an interesting confluence of events, pulled from different times, etc.

Link: mediabistro.com: TVNewser: Viewers Tune In For NBC's Experiment.

Tuesday, Dec 05

Viewers Tune In For NBC's Experiment

Last night, for the first time in the program's 37-year history, NBC Nightly News had a sole sponsor: Philips Electronics. With less ads in between, 'Nightly' had longer-form pieces and expanded segments.

As noted below, the viewer response was big. And the ratings are reflecting that: According to 6:30 affiliate time period numbers (which represent about 75 percent of the country), Nightly News delivered 10,329,000 total viewers last night -- almost 1.2 million more than ABC's 9,156,000 and over 2.3 million more than CBS's 8 million...

[...] 

Link: mediabistro.com: TVNewser: Iraq: Williams Continues On MSNBC.

Wednesday, Dec 06

Iraq: Williams Continues On MSNBC

After signing off on NBC, Brian Williams continued anchoring on MSNBC. Tim Russert had this to say:

"I was so taken by the bluntness and how bleak this report was. When you hear someone, former Chief of Staff Leon Panetta say, 'we need one last chance.' When you hear Jim Baker, former Secretary of State, saying 'we have traded one nightmare for another.' Lee Hamilton saying 'we're not sure this is doable.' What they're doing is saying, 'this is our best effort. It may not be enough, but time is of the essence.'"

[...]

Link: mediabistro.com: TVNewser: MSNBC #1 In 18-34 Demo Last Week.

Wednesday, Dec 06

MSNBC #1 In 18-34 Demo Last Week

"All the news networks do miserably" in the 18-34 demographic, Reese Schonfeld rightfully notes. But with that disclaimer out of the way, it's worth noting that MSNBC "led all four cable news networks in viewers 18-34 in both prime and total day" last week. Schonfeld says MSNBC's primetime lineup has brought in a younger audience.

MSNBC actually had the top nine programs on cable news in the 18-34 demo last week. They were all taped shows, like To Catch A Predator or Lockup, and most aired late at night.

The #1 18-34 program was Sunday's 8pm special "Beyond Conviction," which averaged 142,000 in that demo. The second highest ranked was a 3am repeat of Lockup on Friday morning, with 134,000 in the 18-34 demo...

[...]

The Nation: The Death of News

Link: The Nation: The Death of News.

If it happened all at once, would we call it the Night of Long Knives?

This is one of the biggest indictments I've seen yet to the widespread power-move to co-opt U.S. mass media, by two forces, working against each other, yet oddly, in concert: corporate media decision-making, and the online blog army bent on doing mass media one better.

One force seeks to destroy its 20-30% profit cash cow from within, while the other seeks to expose the inadequacies of the already co-opted journalistic ventures left.

And then we got an executive at Fox News trying to do his best imitation of notorious yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst, who said of the Spanish American War, "You provide the pictures, and I'll provide the war."

Meanwhile, bloggers are rushing in to fill the vast vacuum, along with international journalists (and now, the new English-language al Jazeera). I wonder if the rest of the world also tried to rise to the occasion as the Iron Curtain descended on the Soviet Bloc. International journalists are willing to give up their lives for something that American journalists are throwing away without a fight.

My one hope: maybe all those laid off journalists will descend on the blogosphere with a vengeance, and raise the level of discourse in those spaces with their articulate attention to detail.

Link: The Nation: The Death of News.

The Death of News

Nicholas von Hoffman

Hope for haters of "the media" of whatever stripe or flavor! Judging from recent events, they may not have much media to kick around any more. Things are definitely on the droop in news-media land.

[...]

While foreign journalists are losing their lives, journalists in America are losing their jobs. The Christian Science Monitor reports that "daily newspapers in New York, Boston, Houston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and elsewhere are laying off or buying out hundreds of newsroom employees, as well as other workers." And talk about covering your own funeral: The Monitor added that "last summer, The Christian Science Monitor cut newsroom jobs, too." Those cities do not begin to exhaust the list of places where reporters and editors are being let go.

[...]

The cause of mass reporter firings are varied, but the biggest is long-term loss of circulation, sometimes slowly and sometimes shockingly quick. "Average daily circulation dropped by 2.8 percent during the six-month period ended Sept. 30, compared with the period last year, according to an industry analysis of data released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Circulation for Sunday papers fell by 3.4 percent," wrote the New York Times. If the readers continue to disappear at this rate into the Internet or die off or opt out of word communication for pictures and music, the advertisers are going to do the same.

As readers evaporate, so do advertisers and, although American newspapers continue to be more profitable than most businesses, there is panic over what the future holds in store. Investors, fixated on what they think is going to happen, have pushed down the price of newspaper stocks. The fall in the price is driving the remaining newspaper stockholders nuts.

American corporate managers are schooled to do one thing and one thing only under stress--lay people off. Here and there around the country editors have been resisting. They have been tussling with their own managements, insisting that there comes a point when laying off staff hurts the quality of the product. [emphasis mine]

One such drama has been playing out at the Los Angeles Times, where over the past couple of years two top editors have been shown the door for refusal to lop heads. The Times is owned by the Tribune, a Chicago-based corporation that owns dozens of newspapers, TV stations, Internet sites and even a Major League Baseball team. It makes money, pots of it, but not enough to keep the price of its stock where its owners would like it to be.

[This is the part that boggles my mind. Shareholders and the corporate controllers willing to shut down large contributors to community life and layoff masses of people for the trivial reason of preserving AN ALREADY MASSIVE PROFIT MARGIN. But is that the REAL reason, or is it the COVER for the real reason? Let's go revisit that Fox News memo again, shall we?]

[...]

Since the major shareholders are interested in money, not product quality, they are willing to sell the company or, if they can make more money another way, to split it up and sell it off piece by piece. That is what was done earlier this year with the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. K-R, a quality outfit with a special ethos, is now in pieces under various owners with various ideas of what a good newspaper is supposed to be.

[...]

So who needs newspapers anyhow? We have the Internet. Other than the websites supported by newspapers, the Internet is devoid of reporters. The Internet operations do not pay people to go out and gather accurate information. Thus we are bumping up against a contradictory situation. Thanks to the Internet, the iPod and so forth, we have more media outlets than ever before--but fewer reporters.

When the last reporter is laid off, we can subsist on rumor, speculation and gossip. These three are usually more interesting than the facts, but do you want to bet your life and livelihood on them?

Well, there is always what they call citizen journalism. That means, if you see something, take a picture of it with your cellphone and call in. It's not exactly New York Times reliability, but it's open-source, and they tell us that is terrific stuff.

[...]

NBC purge continues

Link: Variety.com - 'Dateline' lays off 17.

Posted: Fri., Nov. 10, 2006,  12:39pm PT

'Dateline' lays off 17

Number does not include buyouts

NEW YORK--Seventeen "Dateline" employees were issued pink slips Friday as NBC moved forward with a plan to pare hundreds of correspondents, producers and cameramen from the news division by early next year.

Sources inside NBC News said 10 "Dateline" staffers in New York were laid off, five in Washington, DC, one in Chicago and another in Burbank. The affected employees were notified by "Dateline" EP David Corvo.

That number does not include buyouts, which have been offered to dozens of employees across the company.

The restructuring, announced last month as part of the "NBC U 2.0" initiative, will eliminate several hundred jobs from the network's sprawling news division, which employs 2,000 and includes two cable networks and numerous local news staffs across the country.

As part of the initiative, New Jersey-based MSNBC is being consolidated into NBC News headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Center.

Sources say NBC execs were surprised [at] news staffers who volunteered to take a buyout and predict that when the reductions are complete, the number of buyouts will exceed the number of layoffs.

Execs want to complete layoffs within a week to avoid having to do so close to the holiday season.

[milk of human kindness just flows through their veins, doesn't it? Holidays start just over a week from now.]

[...]

Other reductions in the news division are being achieved by not filling empty jobs.

Reporting expenses such as travel for correspondents have come under increased scrutiny, sources said.

[You know, that's the problem when they have this odd thing called "news" in other parts of the world. You gotta think of a way to get them to stop doing that, NBC.]

A Military Halloween Scare: Pentagon decides its PR staff isn't up to snuff

Link: Pentagon mounts public affairs ops to counter bad news, exploit "new media" - Yahoo! News.

Could you call it Pentagon 2.0?

Or should we prepare ourselves for a new media propaganda campaign that will plant stories virally, deep in the Blogosphere, to bubble up for "placement" in mainstream media through a back door?

A standard PR technique of the Bush administration has been to circumvent the national/Beltway media, and to primarily give audiences to local media outlets in various sites the talking heads visit. The presumption of such a technique is that the local media are "rubes" who are less critical and more suseptible to heavy-handed spin and message control. I am not saying I believe those things. I've been one of those local media people. I'm just saying that appears to be the overt the presumption behind such a strategy.

Are local media getting wise to that trick? Are Bloggers their new "rubes?"

If we can assume the GOP PR machine is faltering (given those bad poll numbers we see daily), a person can draw one of two conclusions:

1. Bad policies and incompetence in Iraq (and previous lies exposed) have derailed the previous good public opinion of this administration.

OR

2. The PR process (largely generating fiction) is faltering and failing to do its job properly in the current environment.

Generally, if I were the folks in charge, I'd lean more heavily on the first option and look to fix those issues. That's because the guy who taught me PR drummed it into me when I was in my 20's: Truth is the Best PR. Honestly, it works amazingly well.

Hurricane Katrina provided a big reality check and a turning point, and if the folks in charge couldn't get a clue through their insulated bubble for that one, they surely aren't going to figure out what a disaster they've created in Iraq. I suspect they're currently locked into a position of believing their own spin. Drinking their own Kool-Aid, so to speak.

Sort of like those last weeks of George H.W. Bush's re-election campaign, when his falling numbers could not penetrate the insistent "Go team!" optimism he'd worked himself into at the end of the campaign against Clinton/Gore.

So it appears from the article below that the Pentagon has chosen a PR assault on Option 2. Perhaps the situation in Iraq is so utterly hogtied and stalemated, the Pentagon has no other option besides intensifying the spin. But one would think actually getting the power on in Iraq, or the hospitals and ambulances running properly, would go a long way toward keeping people in the U.S. from thinking the situation there isn't being completely botched Katrina-style. I mean, we are half a world away. Just a token effort at competence in Iraq would have easily conned a lot of people, but even that was too much for this administration.

Iraq appears to have been botched Katrina-style from the very beginning, but since Iraqis were dying instead of people in New Orleans, the fictional spin held the upper hand for audiences half a world away.

I'm not hopeful that a New Media PR campaign can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, in this case. And on the more paranoid side, I shudder at the power of the military behind a massive propaganda campaign. It invokes images of Goebbels to me, the master propagandist.

But the masses lining the streets in Nuremburg, creating those striking images in "Triumph of the Will," that's a POPULIST movement, even if it was a manipulated populism. It had bodies. Masses of bodies, willingly cheering.

And next week we'll find out how easily manipulated the masses of bodies in the U.S. can be. Not because masses of people will be gathered in the disappearing public common spaces in our culture. We gather around our electronic hearths. Populist mentality in crowds has been factored out of the equation.

The Pentagon isn't seeking to actually influence masses in crowds. As Noam Chomsky would say, it seeks to "manufacture consent" among the masses individually, in that nearly one-on-one communion with both our electronic hearth, and now with the interactive screen, the viral social media spaces of the blogosphere.

The question is, freepers be damned, are interactive, viral social media spaces amenable to new Pentagon 2.0 PR tactics?

Maybe instead of asking what Lee Atwater would do, we should ask, "What would Goebbels do?" I found a neat clip on him from Wikipedia I'll paste in below the article excerpt.

Link: Pentagon mounts public affairs ops to counter bad news, exploit "new media" - Yahoo! News.

Pentagon mounts public affairs ops to counter bad news, exploit "new media"

by Jim Mannion

Mon Oct 30,  3:28 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Pentagon is expanding its public affairs operations to counter "inaccurate" news stories and editorials and exploit "new media" to get its message out, its chief spokesman said, denying the effort was linked to the US elections.

The initiative comes amid plummeting domestic support for the war in Iraq and just before crucial mid-term congressional elections in which opposition Democrats are contesting Republican control of the Congress.

Eric Ruff, the Pentagon press secretary, insisted that the new public affairs program was not prompted by either the elections or polls showing that only about 37 percent believe the war is going well.

"What were looking at doing is, 'How can we get better, how can we get faster, how can we transform public affairs?'," he told reporters.

"And we're looking at being quicker to respond to breaking news. Being quicker to respond, frankly, to inaccurate statements," he said.

"And we're looking at this whole issue of new media -- podcasting, and IM-ing and all those kinds of things, where people are basically running circles inside us," he said.

Ruff disclosed the expanded operations after questions were raised about a wall being built in the Pentagon press operations center that will separate the new unit from Pentagon public affairs officials who deal with the media.

He denied that the intent of the new operation was to go around the mainstream news media.

Ruff said he did not know how much the operation is costing or how many people were being hired.

The unit includes a rapid response team, a "new media" group, and a team that specializes in getting Pentagon officials booked on radio and television shows.

[...]

But US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a strident critic of media coverage of Iraq, also has pushed for a sweeping overhaul in the way the military communicates with the public.

In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in February, he called for 24-hour press operations centers and an approach that would give Internet operations and other channels of communications equal status to "20th century press relations."

"It will result in much less reliance on the traditional print press, just as publics of the US and the world are relying less on newspapers as their principal source of information," he said.

Efforts to expand the military's use of "information operations" overseas aroused controversy following disclosures last year that a private contractor was used to secretly plant paid stories in the Iraqi media.

"Information operations" is a military term used to describe propaganda aimed at influencing foreign publics. Traditional Pentagon public affairs, on the other hand, is bound by laws that prohibit propagandizing of Americans.

Asked whether the new Pentagon operations fell under the category of "information operations," Ruff said, "I've not looked at it that way at all."

[...]

So what made Goebbels such a master? What did he do that was so revolutionary? Turns out, according to Wikipedia, at least, one of his greatest innovations was employing new communications technologies ahead of others, in ways others hadn't started doing yet.

Link: Joseph Goebbels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Goebbels technique, also known as argumentum ad nauseam, is the name given to a policy of repeating a point until it is taken to be the truth (see Big Lie). Goebbels also pioneered the use of broadcasting in mass propaganda, promoting the distribution of inexpensive single frequency radio receivers (the so-called Volksempfänger (People's radio) to the German public which ensured that millions of people heard the output of the Reich's propaganda ministry while being unable to receive news and other broadcasts from outside Germany. Meanwhile his ministry busily broadcast Nazi propaganda around the world by shortwave radio. Newsreels, movies and books were impossible to publish without prior approval and censorship by Goebbels' ministry. He is credited by historians with developing the techniques of modern communications and propaganda.

[...]

[Kinda makes him sound invincible, doesn't it? Which is even more interesting in light of this next excerpt from the same Wikipedia entry.]

Goebbels is often remembered for his Sportpalast speech, given on February 18, 1943 (sometimes called the Total War speech) in which he tried to motivate the German people to continue their struggle after the tides of World War II had turned against Germany. By this time many Germans privately believed Germany was irrevocably on its way to defeat.

There was strong animosity between Goebbels and the popular Hermann Göring, whose political influence waned following his disastrous management of the Luftwaffe early during the war and Goebbels became the third most powerful leader in Germany (after Martin Bormann, of whom most Germans were not aware). As Germany's military situation collapsed, the increasing shrillness of the government's propaganda brought discreet ridicule from the German people who nicknamed Goebbels The Malicious Dwarf and The Wotan Mickey Mouse.

[...]

Soooo, it appears the moral to this story is...

That the Big Lie is not all-powerful if reality gets so strong it breaks through? Sure, everybody remembers the Big Lie theory, but they FORGET Part 2, where the dismal reality-based universe breaks through and the Big Lie is exposed. But note, the "increasing shrillness of the government's propaganda," in utter denial even though the Big Lie had been exposed.

Hey, why turn to the truth when you can go down lying, right? Take a leaf out of the book of every hard-core alcoholic or other abusive family system. Deny, deny, deny, in the face of ALL evidence to the contrary. Drink so much Kool-Aid (spiked with whatever) that you are incapable of believing anything BUT your own fictional reality.

Then shoot yourself in a bunker, after poisoning all your children with cyanide. That's what Goebbels did, at least. Few alcoholics or other abusers get to hang out in bunkers with Hitler.

If you're feeling a little deja vu on the way the Germans finally realized their military situation was collapsing, read this bit below on the Big Lie, and feel deja vu again.

It's Halloween! It's supposed to give you nightmares! Boooooo!!!!

Link: Big Lie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Later, Joseph Goebbels put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the phrase big lie. In this theory, the English are attributed with using a propaganda technique wherein they had the mendacity to "lie big" and "stick to it".²

There is an uncited rumor to the effect that Goebbels also offered up his version of the big lie technique without attributing it to either Jewish or Allied propaganda. That uncited quote is the most wide-spread attribution of the big lie, and it is usually given in a context where the implication is that the propaganda technique was invented by Goebbels, who was the propaganda minister for the Third Reich.³

The phrase was also used (on page 51) in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler's psychological profile [1]

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. - OSS report page 51 [2]

"Maximizing Shareholder Value" by any other name still stinks to high heaven

Link: Fresh Intelligence : Radar Online: Massive layoffs at NBC.

When last I wrote about media layoffs (by whatever euphemism they were going by at the time), the bloodletting was in print, New York Times corporation and Knight Ridder.

MSNBC has had some great scoops lately, and a great voice in the form of Keith Olbermann. Too bad my monopolistic cable company (Comcast) has decided I should get the useless CNBC instead of MSNBC, in my cheapo tier of service.

Regardless of those who gain most from newsroom purges in quarterly profit reports (shareholders who demand 20-30% returns, and "growth," above all else), I actually suspect an overt political motive. In the name of maximizing shareholder value, newsrooms are being gutted, turned into naive, sonambulistic, drooling receptories for Enron-like PR and marketing corporate and government snow jobs.

My poly sci professor in college drummed something into my head that will always be my touchstone. Those who watch the endless crime dramas on primetime know this game too. You ask the questions: WHO RULES? WHO BENEFITS?

The answers to those questions reveal the true motivations behind the decisions, regardless of the bullshit PR "TV 2.0" name attached to it.

So are shareholder demands for that high of profits enough to justify the purge of an entire industry (over a 20-year period, as well)? Or are there much BIGGER benefits, BIGGER beneficiaries who are cleaning up on a far bigger scale than mere shareholders?

I can't help it. I watched the Enron documentary the other day, "The Smartest Guys in the Room." It is wonderful. And demoralizing. Because you know that for all this fraud committed as the "big lie" (Hitler's henchmen advocated this approach as superior for propaganda), we know there are thousands of smaller instances of these frauds, cloaked behind the veil of PR obfuscation. Man, that Enron PR and propaganda machine was one piece of work.

Halliburton's subsidiaries are making money off Iraq (that used to be called "war profiteering, when people with knowledge of history still had jobs in smart newsrooms) on such a massive scale, I think the corporate imperative to utterly co-opt all honest journalistic enterprises that could penetrate that veil of propaganda far outweighs such insignificant things as "maximizing shareholder value."

I learned from the Enron film how little regard for shareholders and shareholder value actually exists inside many corporations. Using that for a "reason" is nothing more than a scammer's rationalization for a kind of wholesale corporate crime syndicate, operating on a global scale. I think corporations in the world today have turned criminal to the extent that they make the mafia or yakuza look like bit players.

CBS basically got gutted after Rathergate. ABC News has been co-opted since Peter Jennings died, due to the Disney masters, not because individual journalists there aren't trying. So this rounds it all out. Target: NBC. Currently the only evening newscast I can stand to watch most of the time without flinching.

New York Times Corp: limping. Knight Ridder: gutted. Village Voice... so sad. L.A. Times taking a beating. What's next? The Washington Post?

When will the "Pravda-ization" of U.S. mainstream media be final and complete?

Link: Fresh Intelligence : Radar Online: Massive layoffs at NBC.

THE IDIOT BOX

Plucking Party at NBC News

The massive layoffs at NBC that we predicted a month ago were announced this morning: The network will eliminate 700 jobs company-wide over the next year. And Radar has learned just how bloody a day it will be for the news division: NBC News plans to fire 220 staffers.

It's unclear how the cuts will be distributed across NBC News, but that number includes employees of the news staffs at the network's owned-and-operated local stations. The job cuts are part of "TV 2.0," a network-wide re-evaluation that NBC executives have described as updating the network for the 21st century and insiders call an excuse for massive layoffs.

Among the hardest hit areas will be MSNBC's production staff—NBC is expected to move MSNBC's operations from Secaucus, N.J., and consolidate with either CNBC in Englewood Cliffs or NBC's headquarters in Manhattan—and Dateline NBC. An NBC News spokeswoman did not immediately return a call for comment.

This is an interesting commentary on the move as well, from September:

Who's Afraid of TV 2.0?

THANK YOU, AND GOODNIGHT

If you work at NBC Universal, beware the ides of September. Peacock staffers are sweating bullets over the impending release of what the company is calling TV 2.0, a proposed top-to-bottom reorganization of the network to streamline it for the Internet age. While NBC Universal Television Group honcho Jeff Zucker is pitching the project—recommendations are due mid-month, according to one source—as a visionary look to the future, staffers suspect it will be a merciless look at the bottom line. "Everyone is waiting for the ax to fall," says an NBCer. "There was a board meeting a couple of weeks ago, and the word was, 'How much can you cut for the fourth quarter?'"

"Zucker says we don't want to be like the music industry," says another staffer. Translation: "They want to squeeze money out of this place."

And there's less and less money to go around. NBC, which dropped from first place in the advertiser-friendly 18-to-49-year-old demographic in 2004 to dead last for the past two seasons, sold $1.7 billion in ads for its non-sports programming last May at the Upfronts, when advertisers place bets on the networks' new shows. That's a 10 percent drop from its 2005 take, and a whopping 41 percent drop from 2004, when hits like Friends and The Apprentice raked in $2.6 billion.

An NBC Universal executive, speaking on background, insisted that no decisions have been made: "They're looking at a lot of different scenarios. Nothing has been decided yet." Staffers at the network's news division are particularly on edge because news budgets are a large and easy target, and because Jay Ireland, a former GE auditor and bean-counter at the company's plastics division who now runs NBC Universal's station division, is the exec tasked with wedging NBC News into the TV 2.0 scheme.

[...]

 

Are we all soaking in the "Foxification" of news?

Link: TIME.com: What Hath Fox Wrought? -- Page 1.

This is the most interesting take I've seen on the 10th anniversary of Fox News. I admit, I don't have much use for such a ridiculous excuse for a cable news network, but the author's thesis below carries some weight, more than I'd like it to.

Did Fox News get other news entities to "loosen up?" Think about the British press. To them, the American press is deluded in its attachment to fake neutrality, formulaic balance, presumed yet non-existent "objectivity." The Brits would say the only ones the American Media are fooling are the naive among their audiences.

So here's a strange thought: Is FOX on the same side as the UK's Guardian and Observer?!

Can I wrap my head around that idea? Let me stew on it. What they all seem to have in common is allowing POV to be present in their coverage. For the Brits, it is the norm for most media and news. They distrust media entities that don't admit to having a perspective or a political position. That doesn't mean they don't strive for fairness or to be comprehensive in their coverage. They'd lose crediblity among the more highly literate Europeans (and the barely literate Americans who read the British press) if they didn't.

Now Fox News pretends to be "fair and balanced," but it is unabashedly political and slanted. As the article below argues, by taking a position, even while denying it, Fox may have opened up US media markets for a more European style of news coverage, something no other US media entities have been able to do, save the blog movement.

Where Fox News diverges from the European POV news model that it emulates (heh) is that it doesn't appear to believe it loses credibility by not providing fair and comprehensive coverage of issues, by not covering the parts of the issues it doesn't agree withor can't spin. The Guardian readers expect comprehensive coverage, as do BBC viewers, and so on.

Regardless of the political perspective of the media entity, the model of Enlightenment Humanism most rational actors work from would require that all paths be investigated, not just the ones with which they agree.

I think that is what distinguishes a media entity that owns up to a perspective but still tries to have credibility (the European model) from a propaganda organ or persuasion machine (the Fox model).

But aside from THAT little thing, I'm sure the Foxies will start speaking French VERY soon!

Link: TIME.com: What Hath Fox Wrought? -- Page 1.

What Hath Fox Wrought?

 

Fox news, which is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary, has changed the face of
television. You're watching it, even if you don't think you are

By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

Posted Friday, Oct. 06, 2006

The most ambitious revolutionaries don't just topple regimes; they remake time. The Khmer Rouge started over the calendar at Year Zero. The French revolutionary government decreed a decimal day of ten hours, composed of 100 minutes, each with 100 seconds. The cable-news Jacobins at Fox News may be wishing they had rejiggered their calendar so that they could have celebrated their 10th anniversary a year ago, when they were at their ratings apex. Today, the channel is in its first ratings slump, still far ahead of CNN and MSNBC, but not by as much.

But it's still possible to divide the news calendar into BF and AF—Before Fox and After Fox. Much of what you see on TV news exists because of Fox, and not just the opinion shows. The graphics, the sound effects, the general tone of news is set by Fox. [...]

Even with its ratings down, Fox remains the network against which competitors define themselves. And not just news competitors. After Bill Clinton got off an on-camera harangue against Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace, for an aggressive line of questioning about his administration's anti-terror efforts, the New York Times reported that prominent Democrats, from Howard Dean to Paul Begala, had begun an open campaign of attacking Fox as a covert Republican shill.

[...]

But while "fair and balanced" may be propaganda, it doesn't seem to be fooling anyone. Conservatives see Fox as a comfortable haven for their worldview; their opponents pretty much agree. The balance here is that Fox winks just as broadly to both sides.

In the end, that wink—that is, the Fox gestalt of insouciance, attitude, and even playfulness—has had a bigger effect on the news media than any Bill O'Reilly rant. Fox taught TV news that voice, provocation and fun are not things to be afraid of. And for better or worse, probably every TV news program outside of PBS has been Foxified by now. The explosive graphics on your newscast: that's Fox. The "freeSpeech" opinion segments on the new CBS Evening News: that's Fox, too. Anderson Cooper yelling at a FEMA official or crusading in Africa: that's Fox. Keith Olbermann ranting at George W. Bush and O'Reilly on MSNBC's Countdown: that's Fox through and through, whether Olbermann would like to admit it or not.

Fox's ratings, in other words, may have declined for its 10th anniversary. But there are ratings and then there are ratings. You may tell yourself you don't watch Fox News. But as they used to say in the old Palmolive commercials: You're soaking in it.

Former President Clinton sees restless online media as a key factor in countering a co-opted traditional media

Link: New Media A Weapon in New World Of Politics - washingtonpost.com.

This Washington Post article says Clinton sees the necessity of such strategies as crucial to why Gore and Kerry lost (well, there are those questionable ballot issues, GOP caging, dirty tricks, etc.). And he says mastering that wild card is the most important piece of advice he gave Senator Clinton if she decides to run for president.

Mastering these new factors is seen as the key, but I believe that is wrong-headed at best.

Mastering implies control. Astro-turfing, making fake grassroots organizations, freepers, and, as we see below, inserting messages and talking points from viral points so they trickle UP... all of these techniques imply first that control is possible in a space that is a many-headed AND many-footed beast, a hodge-podge of online communities and cultures.

The illusion is that Rove & Co. have this mastery, that their presumptions of control based on initial successes mean that they have actual control. As the article accurately points out (in a section I did not quote), the scandal around Representative Foley could prove the lie to such an assumption.

Just the other day, a colleague and I were talking about the surreal and bizarre far-right spin on the Foley scandal, laughably blaming a "Democratic machine" for victimizing a poor helpless GOP with its "October Surprise." How quick bullies are to whine and cry and blame someone else for something that was brought on by their own divisive politics, hypocrisy, and deliberate pandering to religious, moral, and racial bigotry.

Do the GOP spinners really believe folks are so gullible? The transparency of the spin not only makes thinking people laugh out loud at the perfection of the karmic return, it also sets off guffaws at the fact that the top-down message architects are so power-drunk and arrogant as to think with a straight face that they can pass off something so stupid. It boggles your mind.

I believe such top-down control is illusory, as illusory as the statement made to Ron Suskind in the New York Times Magazine, that the current administration doesn't need to live in the "reality-based universe," because it is an "actor" and thus creates the reality others must adjust to.

When such notions are advanced, those with wisdom (or those who are not drunk with power) usually understand that a "reality check" is coming. I mean, they don't call it "denial" for nothing. Consult the description of the Tarot card, "The Lightning-Struck Tower" for more information.

And, I think the GOP's early mastery of viral message planting and astro-turfing is highly dependent on mainstream media naivete. We could call that deliberate, if we believe that corporations are gutting the staffs of journalistic entities in the name of maximizing shareholder value, when the REAL goal is to remove experience and skepticism from the newsroom so that the Fourth Estate essentially becomes little more than a vehicle for more sophisticated and better paid PR people and spinners to have their way. One could argue that a naive media maximizes shareholder value... in the P.T Barnum sense, I suppose. After all, shareholders make money from fraud (see Enron), from snake oil (see the pharmaceuticals industry), presumably from selling swampland in Florida, from Savings and Loan companies in the 1980s, hell, even from the U.S. mortgage and credit industry (cough-usury) right now.

If mainstream coverage of online activity were not so poor, Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth could not have been as effective, etc. The skepticism has moved online, but MSM coverage of the skepticism falls into the point-counter-point media balance formula, a formula that has been manipulated by PR and spinners to such a level that it is so meaningless, the Flat Earth Society or Holocaust Deniers could even be invoked in the name of "providing balance."

It is into this climate that those who question evolution or global warming spout their idiocy with a straight face. It is in this climate that I hear a congressperson (as I heard on NPR two days ago) explain away Representative Foley's actions as just another aspect of the oversexed gay menace. Perhaps this fellow believes all queers should be forced to register on sex offender registries, simply by virtue of their sexual orientation.

Then the state of Georgia can try to ban them from living within 100 feet of a bus stop, an attempt to force all on those registries to move out of state, like a garbage barge, because there would be no living space that is not within 100 feet of a school bus stop. But I digress!

Link: New Media A Weapon in New World Of Politics - washingtonpost.com.

New Media A Weapon in New World Of Politics

By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 6, 2006; A01

At first glance, three uproars that buffeted American politics in recent weeks have little in common.

Former congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla.) ended his political career over sexually charged e-mails to former House pages. Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) stumbled over his puzzling use of the word "macaca" and his clumsy response to revelations about his Jewish ancestry. Former president Bill Clinton had a televised temper fit when an interviewer challenged his terrorism record.

All three episodes, however, were in their own ways signs of the unruly new age in American politics. Each featured an arresting personal angle. Each originally percolated in the world of new media -- Web sites and news outlets that did not exist a generation ago -- before charging into the traditional world of newspapers and television networks. In each case, the accusations quickly pivoted into a debate about the motivations and alleged biases of the accusers.

Cumulatively, the stories highlight a new brand of politics in which nearly any revelation in the news becomes a weapon or shield in the daily partisan wars, and the aim of candidates and their operatives is not so much to win an argument as to brand opponents as fundamentally unfit.

In interviews, figures as diverse as Clinton, Vice President Cheney and White House strategist Karl Rove spoke about their experiences navigating the highly polarized and often downright toxic political and media environment that blossomed in the 1990s and reached full flower in recent years. Their comments, and those of their associates, underscore just how dramatically changes in media culture have influenced the strategies and daily routines of leading political figures.

[...]

Clinton -- who regards Rove with a mixture of admiration and disdain as the most effective modern practitioner of polarizing politics -- said in an interview that he has become fixated on the problem of how Democrats can learn to fight more effectively against the kind of attack President Bush's top political aide leveled. Associates of the former president said he thinks that Democrats Al Gore in 2000 and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) in 2004 lost the presidency because they could not effectively respond to a modern media culture that places new emphasis on politicians' personalities and provides new incentives for personal attack.

While the Foley and Allen episodes burned Republicans, Clinton said in an interview earlier this year that he thinks the proliferation of media outlets, as well as the breakdown of old restraints in both media and politics, on balance has favored Republicans. Without mentioning Gore or Kerry by name, he complained that many Democrats have allowed themselves to become unnerved and even paralyzed in response.

"All of this is a head game, you know. . . . All great contests are head games," Clinton said. "Our candidates have to get to a point where they don't allow other people to define them as either people or as political leaders. Our people have got to be more psychologically prepared for it, and there has to be more distance between them and these withering attacks."

Associates said he regards this as his most important advice to his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), if she runs for president in 2008.

[...]

For a full generation on the conservative side, and more recently among liberals, ideologues have created a menu of new media alternatives, including talk radio and Web sites. New media have also elevated flamboyant political entrepreneurs such as Ann Coulter on the right and Michael Moore on the left to prominent places in the political dialogue. New media platforms make criticism of traditional "mainstream media" part of their stock in trade.

This development usually ensures that any politician in trouble can count on some sympathetic forums to make his or her case. It often ensures that any controversy is marked by intense disagreement over the basic facts or relevance of the story, and obscured by clouds of accusation over the opposition's motives.

Clinton benefited from this phenomenon during his recent showdown with Fox News. Appearing on a network that many liberals regard as enemy terrain, he said interviewer Chris Wallace and his bosses were distorting his terrorism record to carry water for conservatives.

Kerry advisers think the most important factor in his loss was the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked his war record. The group initially received scant attention in old media outlets, but its accusations were fanned by the Drudge Report, Fox News and other new media platforms. By the end, the accusations dominated coverage in both old and new media.

Each time a similar episode occurs, it is often covered as an isolated and even eccentric event. But Clinton, in an earlier interview, said his party should understand that the ideological and financial incentives among politicians and media organizations mean that every election cycle will feature such episodes -- and it should plan accordingly.

But he said Democrats of his generation tend to be naive about new media realities. There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies -- and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new-media excesses.

"We're all that way, and I think a part of it is we grew up in the '60s and the press led us against the war and the press led us on civil rights and the press led us on Watergate," Clinton said. "Those of us of a certain age grew up with this almost unrealistic set of expectations."

Few conservatives would make a similar miscalculation. Many of the first generation of new media platforms, including Limbaugh's show and Drudge's Web site, first flourished because of a conviction among conservatives that old media were unfair.

All this has given Republicans a comfort and skill at using new media to political advantage that most Democrats have not matched. At the Republican National Committee, leaking items to the Drudge Report is an official part of communications strategy.

[...]

When is plagiarism not plagiarism?

When the mainstream press mines the blogosphere for scoops, and then fails to credit where they got the story. They may not be lifting content word for word, but they're definitely taking credit for research they didn't do.

And how odd, how those professional journalists supposedly have all this superior training and ethics over bloggers, and how they're always complaining about the lack of journalistic standards among bloggers. Methinks they protest too much.

And for the record, Brian Stelter at the TV Newser blog rocks. He scores big stories at least once a week or more.

Link: Eat The Press | New York Poach: The Post Blatantly Lifts Couric Story (So Does The NYDN, AP) | The Huffington Post.

New York Poach: The Post Blatantly Lifts Couric Story (So Does The NYDN, AP)

Posted Wednesday August 30, 2006 at 12:39 PM

Today's kudos for impeccable media ethics go to the New York Post, which fails to credit bloggers not once, but twice, for stories that would have never crossed its radar screen were it not for the oft-maligned blogosphere. On a tip, TVNewser broke the news yesterday morning of Katie Couric's not-so discreetly airbrushed and slimmed down photo on the cover of a CBS magazine.

[...]

(Incidentally, the NYDN also fails to credit TVNewser over the "Photoshop shocker", though Romenesko, tellingly, gives credit to TVNewser his own linked post.

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What makes this particularly egregious is how obvious the lift is: TVNewser is the leading cable news blog by a mile, avidly read by industry insiders and people who can't get enough of Anderson Cooper. TVNewser editor Brian Stelter posted the Couric item at 1:50 a.m. on August 29th, which meant it was front and center to greet morning media surfers. It was immediately picked up across the blogosphere (66 Technorati links and counting), with hits — and due credit — from Lost Remote, Pajamas Media, Instapundit, Newsbusters, LA Observed and our own Eat The Press.

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It's an interesting debate, and one worth having, in part because the stakes are real, and so are the principles involved. Notwithstanding the arguments made against the "derivative" nature of dubiously-assessed "online journalism"), one thing is clear: "Mainstream" journalists can't keep on knocking bloggers for being derivative when they continue to take credit for their work.

— Sven Hodges

UPDATE: The AP has the story too — sans reference to TVNewser. Come on, people, do you think we can't read?

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: More at Google News. Sheesh. MSM, clean up your act.

HORRIFIED UPDATE TO THE UPDATE'S UPDATE: The CBS Public Eye blog writes up the item and credits the Daily News!!!! Public Eye, you're supposed to stand for transparency and accuracy and all that is fine and noble in journalism!!! Plus, don't you read TVNewser? Please fix.

Guardian 'Comment is Free' vs. Huffington Post and the Blogosphere?

Terrific interface design analysis by Nico Macdonald on the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. [bold emphasis below is mine]
 

It's not really a competition or an adversarial relationship as much as it is Macdonald doing directly comparative analysis of interface design/ease of use and community development features.

It's an effort to discover the reason why the Guardian's "Comment is Free" project still doesn't feel quite solid when compared to other efforts from the blogging netroots, or even with a blog-based CMS (as in Huffington Post) instead of the antiquated grandfathered-in obtuse old newspaper CMS's that you still find across the U.S. as well. You know, newspaper sites that require a "free login" to get to the content, newspapers without permalinks, so that their archives not only go dead, they drop out of Google as well.

Insanely obtuse stuff you find when rooting around on these godawful U.S. newspaper sites. Hey, at least the Guardian and the BBC are trying to do interesting and innovative stuff!

Link: 'Comment is Free,' but designing communities is hard.

'Comment is Free,' but designing communities is hard

Analysis: The Guardian's attempt to build an engaging group blog further illustrates the cultural differences between running a newspaper and an online conversation.

By Nico Macdonald

Posted: 2006-08-17

In a recent lecture to the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in Londonⁱ Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger candidly admitted that established newspapers had an equivocal relationship with the concept of reader-based discussion. "Occasionally the little people would write a letter... and we would print a few, very graciously" he noted wryly. With the growth of the Internet email-based submission of letters was added, but this changed little except the volume and speed of response. With the development of online newspapers a variety of models have been tried with limited success, including Web-based discussion forums, separated from newspaper content; published the email addresses of journalists at then end of stories; and hosting live debates.

[...]

The Guardian situation

In the UK the Guardian newspaper, particularly notable for its columnists and the quality of its letters page, had long employed Web-based discussion forums such as Guardian Talk as part of its Guardian Unlimited network.

Having visited the US to research new developments, editor Alan Rusbridger observed the disagreggation of advertising and editorial, and the changing nature of editorial. He also observed the growth of non-traditional opinion aggregators such as the Huffington Post, which was competing with everything from The Nation and MotherJones to the Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer. On the home front he noted that the Guardian's readers had "started talking to one another, and going behind our backs to our sources and reports."

Characterizing the papers of record as being stuck in 'journalism as revelation' mold, he questioned whether saying "We have got all these distinguished newspaper columnists" was an adequate response. "They're not laughing at Ariana Huffington now," he observed. "They are saying, 'That is really interesting.'"

In response to these developments, in March this year, the Guardian launched Comment is Free, a "collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists from the Guardian and Observer newspapers with other writers and commentators representing a wide range of experience and interests"ⁱⁱⁱ. Comment is Free is edited by Guardian veteran Georgina Henry and politics page editor Tom Happold, and inspired by celebrated Guardian editor C. P. Scott's famous aphorism 'Comment is free but facts are sacred'^iv.

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The overall interface design of Comment is Free was  developed in house by the Guardian Unlimited design team with direction from Guardian creative director Mark Porter. It is a good and appropriate improvement on the 1998 Guardian Unlimited design, though it presents a similarly confused information architecture, eliding links to comments from 'This week', 'Subjects A-Z', the 'Editors' blog', and the 'Steve Bell' cartoon.

As with most online publications, the Comment is Free interface is text-driven and linear^vi, and fails to exploit people's visual powers, even to the extent, perhaps, of making more commented on posts more attention grabbing – a model pioneered as early as 1997 in the discussion areas at the BBC's commercial site Beeb.com^vii.

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Successes

The Guardian appears to consider Comment is Free to be a success, though Henry is frank about the challenges with which they are dealing. To its credit Comment is Free was nominated for the Innovation category of New Statesman New Media Awards 2006, though it didn't win.

In his RSA lecture Rusbridger was honest in identifying the Huffington Post as the inspiration for Comment is Free, and Henry notes that the Post "has outstripped its liberal old media competitors in the 10 months since it launched" (Welcome to Comment is free, March 14, 2006). Despite being a 'me too' product the Guardian deserves credit for the ambition and scale of its engagement with the developments in online debate.

Flaws in the model

However, Comment is Free has a number of flaws. Some possible flaws (around the defensive selection of authors and tiny fraction of readers who comment) were addressed by Bob Cauthorn in Can newspapers do blogs right? (Robert Niles, OJR, 2006-04-23), and were responded to by Guardian Unlimited assistant editor Neil McIntosh in his comments posted on the piece. Although Comment is Free is presented as a Weblog-based service, the posts often don't follow a basic tenet of Weblogging: linking. This doesn't significantly undermine the system, though it reinforces the feeling that this is an established newspaper space. This limitation is partly a product of the existing Guardian Unlimited infrastructure.

[...]

Comment is Free also appears to have ignored another tenet of Weblogging: instant publication. According to one author "you do not actually have access to 'your' page. You send copy to the editors, who then vet it, edit it and put it online at their own pace. There is no immediacy, and no direct control of your copy. The entire feeling of speaking directly to readers is lost, as it is so heavily mediated, not just by the editing process but the technology itself".

The dynamics of posting a comment in Web-based fora have rarely been well addressed in publishing or any other sector. This may be because forum creators don't properly think through any scenarios of use. For instance: someone reads a piece online (or in print), and thinks they might want to comment on it. Assuming they are registered (and, if they are starting in print, can find the piece online) they judge the quality of the discussion and decide to post their comments. But if comments are pre-moderated, how do they know when their comment has been posted? And when they have been posted, how might they know when further comments have been posted, particularly comments referring to their contribution?

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Learning from experience

There has been much study of the dynamics of online community, and there is considerable empirical evidence about how to foster good dynamics in this area. One of the earliest examples was the Sausalito, California-based bulletin board The Well. It flourished partly because of its limited, and professionally and geographically proximate, membership and by promoting maxims such as 'You own your own words'^xi.

Reflecting on the problem of 'scale' and 'common purpose' in online communities, Bryant says "there is simply no way of creating a single community at this scale with only semi-authenticated users".

The equivalent of The Well today is the Weblog model, in which individual- or group-owned Weblogs link to other Weblogs and posts and use trackback to create discussion threads from distributed contributions. This encourages a higher quality of debate, as people tend not to post offensive or ill-thought-out comments on their own Weblog, where they would be prominent for days or weeks, potentially damaging their online profile and reputation.

A number of Comment is Free contributors have suggested the use of trackback to facilitate this model (see Welcome to Comment is free, March 14, 2006). However, Hammersley noted that when the Guardian's Newsblog still supported trackbacks "we were getting 1000+ trackback spams an hour. It kills the server, and fills the blog with porn" (comment in Pick of the week, March 24, 2006). One solution to this danger might be to only allow trackback 'pings' from sites registered in the profiles of Comment is Free members.

If any model of distributed contribution is to work the Guardian will have to address another issue, which is that its stories often appear at more than one URL. For instance leading Guardian writer Simon Jenkins's article on the BBC charter renewal 'The BBC will never cut its cloth to suit any cloak but big' is published on the main site at http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1731048,00.html and on Comment is Free at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1731054,00.html. This makes it difficult for Technorati, or any other tool, to aggregate references to the piece.

While these criticisms are made in the context of Comment is Free, the Guardian is in good company – which includes the Huffington Post – in the struggle to create a complementary public sphere online. What they also have in common is an apparent reluctance to build on existing research about these spaces, or to properly use design thinking to best address the scenarios of use around them.

The bigger issues

With Comment is Free the Guardian has moved smartly to address a significant development in its domain and its initial stumblings are at least understandable. At the RSA lecture Guardian Unlimited editor-in-chief Emily Bell joined the debate to argue that they had "just invented the Spinning Jenny" and were "up against people making piles of Levi's in their bedrooms".

However, to the extent that it sells itself on its commentariat it is not clear how Comment is Free can sidestep the continuing disaggregation of the newspaper industry that Rusbridger described. What is to stop an enterprising startup or a Yahoo! creating an opinion portal aggregating RSS feeds from the Guardian and its free-to-access competitors – as well as the key English language current affairs publications – and creating a better editorial, discussion and business model around them? Yes, readers would have to go to the free-to-access hosting site to read the original piece. But other than brand loyalty to the Guardian, and investment in one's reputation as a Comment is Free contributor, it is hard to see what would stop commenters from moving. If the smart commenters were to move, the authors would be likely to engage with them on their new ground – and if a more author-friendly business model were devised they may move wholesale.

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Lost Remote opines on Web vs. TV news

A cautionary tale? Anybody remember when everyone assumed ALL search pages have to be cluttered with a gazillion portal things? Until Google came along.

I think the comparisons below emphasize the limitations of assuming the convention of the moment is sufficient to formulate prescriptive rules in cement for all time.

Sort of like determining the branding effectiveness of banner ads solely on click-thru rates (late 1990s).

Link: Lost Remote TV Blog.

Web capitalizes on lost credibility in TV news

August 2nd, 2006

While credibility continues to plummet on TV (see below), it stands to reason that people are increasingly attracted to the web for their news — especially as the quality of online video improves. After all, many of the frustrations of TV news are avoided online. Why wait until 5:20 p.m. to get my weather when I can punch it up right now? Why endure all those “you won’t believe what happens next” teases? Why sit through commercial breaks? Why watch all my news filtered through a couple anchors? Why can’t I have my opinions heard on the air? While our online audiences grow, it’s important that TV websites are careful not to carry over some of the annoying, old media aspects of TV news. For one, littering the home page with promos. Or covering too much crime. Or over-emphasizing urgency. Remember, the web is not TV, and TV’s declining credibility with news — while unfortunate — is an opportunity for the web.

Is the coveted youth demographic too smart for current news programming decisions?

Link: Variety.com - Newsies are a punchline for young auds.

The people I'd like to see called into account in response to this Variety article below are the ones who develop programming wisdom, who make programming decisions, who set the over-arching philosophies and policies for strategies to reach that much-coveted 18-35 demographic, across the industry.

It seems to me that these people operate in a black box, and I really know nothing about how their process works. It isn't transparent at all, and falls, I think, into the land of trade secrets, special sauce, voodoo, what-have-you. Add water and stir. Shake and see what pours out. Then send the troops to marching to carry out these directives. That's how it looks from where I stand, at least.

But what if the methods used to arrive at these over-arching programming decisions are poorly constructed? Use unvalidated statistics? Suffer from shortness of vision, or assumptions about the audience that can be easily disproven? Any of these things could be rampant inside the black box (and it would seem shareholders who have an interest in programming successes would care about this), and presented as a finished and polished "wisdom" beyond where it can be questioned, on any level, except with another crap shoot, with interchangable overpaid CEOs or a new regime that descends again into the black box until it emerges again with some new "wisdom" or "brilliant youth demo programming formula," and no one knows how they arrived at it.

One reason I'm so fond of the tendency for transparency with blogs.

Link: Variety.com - Newsies are a punchline for young auds.

Newsies are a punchline for young auds

By BRIAN LOWRY

MEMO TO TV NEWS: You know all that time and energy you've invested hoping to amuse, divert and entice younger viewers with frothy "news you can use," scary "It could happen to you" segments and imperiled teens?

Sorry to break the news, but they're not laughing with you, they're laughing at you.

Traditional news isn't just being ignored by savvy younger audiences. It's become a punchline. NewsLab exec director Deborah Potter notes in this month's American Journalism Review how Web sites like YouTube circulate TV's gaffes and bloopers in record time, but such mistakes often draw fewer guffaws than the inane antics newscasts pull intentionally.

Pundits have already fretted over "The Daily Show" effect, citing research positing that Jon Stewart's satirical program has heightened disdain for politics and media, potentially reducing participation in the process.

Yet that conveniently ignores how much news organizations do to undermine their credibility without Stewart's help, exacerbating the disconnect between them and an educated Internet-age crowd that they desperately yearn to reach.

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Colbert fired back on "The Daily Show" last week, unleashing this devastating faux tirade: "What are you implying, Jon, that O'Reilly and Geraldo are narcissists enthralled with their own overblown egos, projecting their own petty insecurities onto the world around them, inventing false enemies for the sole purpose of bolstering their sense of self-importance -- itty-bitty Nixons minus the relevance or a hint of vision? How dare you!"

The audience howled.

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Still, Fox News is hardly alone in the crosshairs, however ripe its targets might be. ...ABC News [was] rightfully lampooned for contemplating whether Armageddon is near, and for [another's] silly "Countdown to Cease-Fire" clock on Monday. Stewart's producers also hilariously caught ABC following a promo for its prestigious news Emmy nominations with a breathless blurb for the "medical mysteries" series -- about a boy who resembles a werewolf.

When ABC junked its scheduled "Primetime" on Thursday to focus on London's thwarted terrorist attack, I gasped aloud, "Oh no! When will we learn more about werewolf boy?" Not to worry. "20/20" returned to form a day later, focusing on a con artist who married multiple women.

[...]

O'Reilly and Geraldo, however, preach to an audience that's predominantly over 60, whereas fully a third of "The Daily Show" contingent is under 30. And if many of those younger folks have soured on TV news, it's because cable and broadcast networks keep rolling out lemons, not because Stewart and Colbert bitingly turn them into lemonade.

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No comment needed on this one

Link: mediabistro.com: TVNewser: Two Jordanian Freelancers Say They Won't Work For "Blatantly One-Sided" Fox News.

Two Jordanian Freelancers Say They Won't Work For "Blatantly One-Sided" Fox News

Two Amman-based Jordanian freelance producers have declared they will no longer work for Fox News Channel in a message that denounces the network as an "instrument of the Bush White House and Israeli propaganda."

Serene Sabbagh and Jomana Karadsheh's letter, dated July 31, was forwarded to scores of reporters and others. In the letter, they write: "We base our decision on moral issues. We can no longer work with a news organization that claims to be fair and balanced when you are so far from that."

The two women say the network has a responsibility to report fairily for the "sake of your very naive viewers." They say they hoped the network would "develop a degree of respect to people in this part of the world." But: "The disdain and blatant one-sided coverage of all Mideast conflicts only highlights your total lack of humanity and bias toward Israel."

They also criticize "inexperienced anchors" and their "racist comments," calling them a "shameful scar on the American Media," and comparing them to the "state run Television networks in countries you despise in the Middle East."

[...]

The text of the letter:

Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006

Dear All,

We would like to announce our resignation from Fox News in Amman. Although we never actually worked for your organization, we helped for the past three years in facilitating your work in the Middle East.

We base our decision on moral issues. We can no longer work with a news organization that claims to be fair and balanced when you are so far from that. Not only are you an instrument of the Bush White House, and Israeli propaganda, you are war mongers with no sense of decency, nor professionalism. You have crossed all borders and red lines. An Arab mother cries over the death of her child very much like an American and Israeli mother.

Arab blood is not cheap, and we are not barbarians. You ought to be more responsible and have more decency when you take one side against the other. You have a role to play and a responsibility to shoulder for the sake of your very naive viewers.

Throughout the three years we worked with you, and helped you, we thought you would develop a degree of respect to people in this part of the world. But the disdain and blatant one-sided coverage of all Mideast conflicts only highlights your total lack of humanity and bias toward Israel. Your lack of professionalism has made you a tool of ridicule throughout the world. Your inexperienced anchors with their racist comments are not only a shameful scar on the American Media, they simply represent state run Television networks in countries you despise in the Middle East.

Finally, our decision again is based on moral and professional basis and from now on we will no longer help in any Fox related matters.

Serene Sabbagh

Jomana Karadsheh

Some great quotations from Rebecca MacKinnon on Read-Write Journalism

I jumped on here from Jay over at Pressthink, which she cites the best bit of below, but I want to dig down deep in what Rebecca wrote, for the meaty bit I hope to hang on to.

I'm hoping that some of my journalism students from last year at the University of Montana who were so resistant to my blogging assignments will see this and take it to heart.

I may even bold up my favorite bits, to make sure they get the point.

Link: RConversation: "Real" Journalism on the Read-Write Web.

"Real" Journalism on the Read-Write Web

At the conclusion of his latest New Yorker article Columbia J-school Dean Nick Lemann writes:  "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away."

Absolutely. Journalism schools are not going to be doing their jobs unless they're doing everything possible to help students get comfortable alongside bloggers and everybody else here on the Internet. Bloggers hang out here every day, ready to engage journalists in debate and conversation, and even to collaborate with them for the sake of a more informed public discourse. The most effective journalists of the future will find ways to utilize the Internet's read-write potential, as opposed to 20th-century media's read-only capacity

[...]

I thought Susan Crawford made an excellent suggestion for helping reporters find their voice and impact on the Internet: "...a better approach might be letting reporters have a personality online -- not just the occasional video, but a constant online presence that's more than a byline."

[My own experience with MSM is that this very idea scares the PISS out of corporate media legal departments, and I don't know of any way they could ever reconcile themselves to so little control over voice and the PR of corporate self-presentation. To allow reporters such unbridled voice space and not cramp that voice up into a teeny tiny sanitized-for-your-protection box just vibrates off into a space that for them flashes "Danger, danger, Will Robinson!"]]

Susan's right. Every journalism student ought to maintain a blog, and experience what it feels like to have your audience talk back to you (or ignore you).  They too can discover as I first did two years ago, when I was posting on North Korea zone several times per day, that our readers can help us uncover information we never would have come up with on our own, and that the debates fanning out in reaction to our blog posts can force us to sharpen our analysis because we'll quickly be called out on any contradiction or error. (See this article and this report about my experience - both PDF.) As Jay Rosen points out, learning to survive and thrive in the blogosphere as a journalist is actually very hard work:

...what the sweaty champions of “journalism as a form of blogging” overlook is how hard it is for your average reporter to thrive in the link-filled, argument-rich, emotionally-present, here’s-where-I-stand style that traditional bloggers have cultivated over the years. It takes time. Perhaps the hardest part is you actually have to be interested in what other people are saying. 

And believe me, listening is a new skill for many people in the profession. He also says:

We hear every day how “the pros are gonna blog you under the table.” Count me unimpressed. I say a majority of the blogging is going to continue to be done by the traditional underwear types who have the passion and irreverance the pros seem to lack. 

Actually, though, lots of journalists are using blogs to do read-write journalism, with passion, in new and creative formats. But many - myself included - have had to leave established big-name media organizations in order to do so.

[I sure would like to know how they EAT and keep roofs over their heads to do it.]

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What's more, if you look around the world, in many places "real" journalism is actually fleeing to the read-write web from MSM. Globally, many journalists are being driven to blogging because the corporate and political climates in their own countries make it impossible for them to do the kind of journalism they want to do within established news organizations. Real journalism being: the kind that informs the public about what they need to know, whether or not various powerful people want the public to know it.

[...]

Which brings me to a tough question for which I don't have the answer. What are journalism schools for? Do they exist merely to teach the next generation how to secure and hold jobs in media organizations - whether or not those jobs actually practice anything remotely adhering to the ideals of journalism that we teach? The dean of another major U.S. journalism school recently told me he worries that J-schools are training people to do the kind of journalism which, increasingly, fewer and fewer news organizations actually have any interest in producing. 

[Actually, I am aware of SOME media organizations where actually doing what you've been taught in journalism school to the professional standards you were held to at the time can get you DEMOTED. And you know what? I'd put money there are a lot of working journalists who can give me a witness on that. I even had a copyeditor lecture me once that one of the primary tenets of journalism had NO place in our newsroom.]

Are J-schools doing enough to equip young people with the values, skills, creativity, ingenuity and COURAGE necessary to help reinvent both the industry and the profession - so that by the end of the 21st century it will still be possible to get paid to do something resembling real journalism? I guess I'll find out soon...

Military bloggers: an interesting twist on citizen journalism

This comes from the Wall Street Journal, so it's not the most even-handed account of the military blogging phenomenon, nor does it really go into the influence zone of such military blogs (old media still only sees things in terms of the "broadcast" one-too-many moment, without understanding that interactive audiences participate and help shape the communities around these spaces, and the strength of such communities or blog-cites reflect the "sphere" of the military). Where's the mention of Technorati rank, attention to comments, anything that might reflect a wider view of the blogosphere than simply comparing it to MSNBC with Nielsen ratings-style information?

Personally, I think you can't chart this trend without going back to the former military colonel and often cable news pundit, the late Col. David Hackworth. A colorful character in his own right, Hackworth became a vehicle through which many soldiers could start thinking about getting their stories, their truths, out.

There are some neat bits to note in this story.

WSJ.com - Cry Bias, and Let Slip the Blogs of War.

Cry Bias, and Let Slip the Blogs of War

By MIKE SPECTOR
July 26, 2006; Page B1

J.P. Borda started a Web log during his 2004 National
Guard deployment in Afghanistan to keep in touch with his family. But
when he got home, he decided it was the mainstream media that was out
of touch with the war.

"You hear so much about what's going wrong," he says. "It gets hard to hear after a while when there's so much good going on."

Mr. Borda, a specialist, read other soldiers' blogs and found he wasn't alone. Hundreds of other troops and veterans were blogging world-wide, and many focused on a common enemy: journalists.

The 31-year-old software analyst, who now lives in Dallas, wanted to make it easier for people to read soldiers' accounts. So he started a Web site, Milblogging.com, to organize as many blogs as possible by country, military branch and subject matter. Today, the site links to more than 1,400 military blogs world-wide and was recently purchased for an undisclosed amount by Military.com, a Web site catering to soldiers that is owned by Monster Worldwide Inc.

Now, Mr. Borda finds himself at the center of a growing blogging movement. Military bloggers, or "milbloggers" as they call themselves, contend that they are uniquely qualified to comment on events in armed conflicts. Many milbloggers also argue that the mainstream media tends to overplay negative stories and play down positive military developments. For many of these blogs, says Mr. Borda, "the sole purpose is to counteract the media."

[...]

The backlash takes many forms. Some bloggers point out what they see as inaccuracies and post lengthy critiques of current reporting. Others post their own stories. Some simply sling arrows.

[...]

Not all milblogs wave the flag. Some have drawn attention for posts that irk the chain of command. Jason Hartley, a National Guardsman from New Paltz, N.Y., caught flak for posting comments on his blog, "justanothersoldier.com" that he said were satirical. Mr. Hartley, who served in Iraq, wrote that he loved dead civilians and wished he could shoot children. He claimed the comments were meant to highlight what he sees as the military's nonchalant attitude toward civilian casualties, but his superiors weren't amused. Mr. Hartley was eventually demoted to specialist from sergeant, and his commander, Capt. Vincent Heintz, wrote in a sworn statement that the blog "disparaged the Army in a manner unbecoming of an NCO (non-commissioned officer)."

[...]

The Pentagon, taking notice of the impact of such writings, has a committee studying military blogs over the next several months. In the field, the Army has issued formal guidance about blogging, reminding soldiers not to post information that might tip off the enemy. And U.S. Central Command officials in Florida have started contacting bloggers -- military and civilian -- when they come across posts that contain what they view as inaccurate or incomplete information. But overall, military blogs remain independent, with little organized oversight.

Military blogs receive a fraction of the hits generated by mainstream news Web sites. Mr. Burden's site, for example, receives about 210,000 unique visitors per month, he says. In comparison, Nielsen/Netratings data shows MSNBC.com got 24 million unique visitors last month.

But milbloggers, who only began online postings in earnest within the past three years, have become increasingly energized and organized in their efforts to counteract existing media coverage. In April, bloggers convened in Washington, D.C. for the first ever milblogging convention.

[...]

What's the future of military blogs? Mr. Borda would like to see milbloggers get their own TV shows or have their entries printed in major newspapers. The goal, he says, is to "continually be blurring that line between the media and blogging."