Newspapers need more 'buzz'

Associated Press via Yahoo!: Newspapers should "innovate in big, revolutionary ways" if they want to capture younger and light readers, says John Lavine of Northwestern University.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Gates outlines vision of the future of news

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates gave the keynote at the Newspaper Association of America's annual publishers conference yesterday in Seattle. You can find excerpts of his speech on CyberJournalist.net. Industry veteran Vin Crosbie summed up the presentation:

Gates didn't say much that was new. Mirroring the general 'post-bubble' consensus among experts, he sees the publishing industry as now between the Web wave and the Wireless wave and anticipates a fusion of print and online formats. He also, not surprisingly, touted Tablet PCs as the latest electronic delivery platform for periodicals.

A cash haul for some news sites

In his latest E&P column, Steve Outing writes: Nearly a decade into the online-news boom, media companies can be proud of their growth and reaching a certain level of maturity. For those news organizations that take the Internet seriously (and that's definitely not everyone, yet), news sites are a real business, bringing in substantial revenues.

First sci-fi in Biz2

Cory wrote a short science fiction story for Business 2.0, the first ever published by the publication.

Music labels warn 1 million users

San Jose Merc: Music labels launch anti-piracy salvo. Lead:

The music industry started sending the first of a million instant messages Tuesday to computer users it suspects of trading pirated music.

The automated messages warn individuals that what they're doing is illegal and could get them sued.

The Recording Industry Association of America joined three other groups representing songwriters, music publishers and artists in what it described as an educational campaign directed at millions of Kazaa and Grokster users. The first 200,000 messages went out Tuesday. It expects to send a million in the first week.

Here's an excerpt from the industry's warning:

COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT WARNING

It appears that you are offering copyrighted music to others from your computer. Distributing or downloading copyrighted music on the Internet without permission from the copyright owner is ILLEGAL. It hurts songwriters who create and musicians who perform the music you love, and all the other people who bring you music.

When you break the law, you risk legal penalties. There is a simple way to avoid that risk: DON'T STEAL MUSIC, either by offering it to others to copy or downloading it on a "file-sharing'' system like this.

When you offer music on these systems, you are not anonymous and you can easily be identified. You also may have unlocked and exposed your computer and your private files to anyone on the Internet. Don't take these chances. Disable the share feature or uninstall your "file-sharing'' software. For more information on how, go to http://www.musicunited.net/5_takeoff.html

Here's Amy Harmon's story in the NY Times on the same subject.

Some spam is made a felony

NY Times: In the toughest move to date against unsolicited commercial e-mail, Virginia enacted a law imposing harsh new felony penalties, including prison time.

Now we're talking.

Will bloggers pick the next president?

Howie Kurtz at the Washington Post wonders if bloggers will pick the next president.

Speeding up the arrow keys

Since almost every computer question I toss out here on New Media Musings seems to get answered by the erudite blogging readership, here's another:

Isn't there a way to speed up the cursor in Microsoft Word? I don't mean the mouse cursor -- I mean moving the cursor in a Word doc to the right, left, up or down with the arrow keys on your keyboard.

I've searched the Microsoft Knowledge Base, the (typically useless) Help files in Word, the byzantine Options menu in Word, even Google. Hundreds of postings on how to speed up or slow down the mouse speed on your screen, but not a word on how to speed up the keyboard arrow keys in a Word doc, which seem painstakingly slow to me.

Anyone?

Five minutes later: Holy good night, I've already gotten an answer. Mike Thompson writes to tell me to go to Control Panel | Keyboard. (I'm running Windows XP on a Dell PC, but should work for other Windows operating systems.) There, I changed the "Repeat Rate" from moderately slow to fast. Because it's accompanied by an AA graphic, I assumed it applied only to text, but it works for the arrow key as well.

Adds Mike: "This will increase the speed of repeat for all characters in all programs (which may not be a bad thing), but it is the only solution I've ever seen. The only possible downfall I see is your backspace/delete keys will go faster too." That's true -- the delete key is too fast now, but I'll learn to live with it.

Thanks, owe you one. Meantime, anyone at Microsoft listening? This is an obvious UI issue that needs addressing.

Newsweek.com getting its name back

Dow Jones Business News:

NBC News and the Washington Post Co. renewed an agreement to share editorial, technological and promotional resources but announced that Newsweek magazine's Internet site will revert to the name it had before the partnership began in 1999.

Blogs and the enterprise

Jon Udell of the recently downsized InfoWorld on the mission of blogs and the benefits to the enterprise.

The secret to invisibility

Raleigh, NC, News & Observer: Inventor claims he can make things invisible. It's not as far-fetched as it sounds.

Free networking in NH

Wired News: A proposed law could legalize the unauthorized use of open wireless connections in the Granite State. Digital rights activists hail the law as enlightened.

NewsHour segment on blogs is online

For veteran bloggers, last night's PBS NewsHour segment on weblogging covered familiar territory: what's a blog, who does it, why they do it, whether it challenges the standing of big media, etc. But as a way to introduce blogging to a mass audience, I thought the producers and correspondent Terence Smith did a bang-up job.

You can catch the streaming video of the piece, or audio only, or read the transcript, all on this landing page.

OJR on the Courant's blog clampdown

Over the past three days, the online-news list has been hoppin' with commentary about the Hartford Courant's decision to force a newsroom employee to quit his independent weblog.

Mark Glaser of OJR follows the story today in his latest column. Excerpt:

Uber-blogger and law prof Glenn Reynolds runs InstaPundit independently while writing a blog-like column for MSNBC.com. "I think it's dumb of them [the Courant]," he told me. "It's all about control. It's a mix of modestly reasonable fears of what might happen with modestly unreasonable fears of what could happen. People think of it as a free speech issue but maybe it's antitrust: suppressing competition." ...

Tom Mangan is the copy editor/page designer on the features desk at the San Jose Mercury News. He maintains a personal weblog with opinions on everything from photographing cats to politics, but doesn't mention his connection to the Mercury News. The reason? "Our contract does stipulate that a Guild member must seek management permission on any outside activity that uses the name of the paper," he told me via e-mail. "If, for instance, my blog was about copy editing and stated my employment at the Mercury News, I'd have to seek management approval."

I'll be writing my thoughts up on the subject today for CyberJournalist.net.

More on Apple's music store

Jon Fortt has an overview in the San Jose Merc of Apple's launch of an online music store. Excerpt:

``These services treat you like a criminal,'' [Steve] Jobs said of his competition, the existing subscription online music services. ``We think subscriptions are the wrong path,'' he said, and predicted that people prefer to buy, not rent, music.

Rob Reid, founder and chairman of San Francisco rival Listen.com, disagreed. He said that although Listen.com's Rhapsody service has offered CD burning for six months, 87 percent of users prefer to listen to music on their computers under Rhapsody's $9.95 monthly subscription.

It'll be fascinating to see who's right.

A new direction for Utne

NY Times: A new direction for Utne. The bimonthly magazine is now focusing on printing more original material.

The iTunes Music Store

Here's more on Apple's new iTunes Music Store.

The DRM issues are interesting here. The page says:

In a nutshell, you can play your music on up to three computers, enjoy unlimited synching with your iPods, burn unlimited CDs of individual songs, and burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each.

And this:

One of the first things youíll notice about the music is the stunning sound quality. In fact the sound was so good that audiophiles who beta tested the iTunes Music Store were astonished to learn they were listening to 128 kbps sound files. The secret? Itís the new AAC format, which combines sound quality that rivals CDs with smaller files sizes (compared to MP3s). So not only do the songs take up less space on your hard disk, they can be downloaded faster, too.

I'll be interested in hearing users' reactions after they've used the new service. I'll try downloading iTunes4 in the next day or so and give it a whirl. Can't tell if these downloaded songs will work only in an iPod or if they'll work with MP3 players as well, which seems unlikely given the new format.

Later: Joi Ito shares his iTunes Music Store buying experience and the DRM factor.

Rights for Creators website

The National Writers Union has created a Rights for Creators website that targets unfair, restrictive contracts for freelance writers.

Calling all California newspaper bloggers

Paul Grabowicz of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism is putting together another conference panel and wants to know:

Are there any newspaper reporters or columnists in California, other than Dan Gillmor, who write weblogs sanctioned by their publications?

I don't know of any. (The SF Bay Guardian dropped their blog a year or so ago.) Do you?

NewsHour segment on blogging

A few months back a reporter for PBS's Online NewsHour contacted me for some background on the blogging phenomenon. Tonight, their segment on blogging airs "at approximately 29 minutes" after the program begins. The story contains interviews with Joan Connell of MSNBC.com, political blogger Josh Marshall, one of Joshís readers, a group of bloggers who are not (yet) nationally known, and discusses the Trent Lott affair and warblogs, with some general explanation thrown in for our audience.

The real audio/transcript version should appear on this page sometime soon.

Among the Maya ruins

Yesterday's NY Times Travel section featured stories on Maya ruins in Central America and southern Mexico.

Here's an online photo slide show accompanying that article. I just love this stuff, as you might guess from my own photo package of Maya ruins at Tikal, Guatemala. Now I've got to figure out how to carve out some vacation time in Palenque or Tulum.

Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule?

Jakob Nielsen: Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule?

The Madonna Remix Project

In a salute, of sort, to Madonna telling downloaders to f*** off, some enterprising folks have put together the Madonna Remix Project, featuring Madonna's admonition in several remixed flavors.

Hollywood Reporter has the story. Excerpt:

A third group saw a creative opportunity. "What the f--- do you think you're doing," Madonna's now-infamous phrase, is turning up in dozens of remixes and the computer-aided musical collages known as cutups or mashups.

Independent music community DMusic is now hosting a competition for the best Madonna-based track, with the first prize being a "boycott-riaa" T-shirt and stickers.

Market for DVD singles expanding

NY Times: Music labels -- not the movie studios -- are pushing a new market for DVD singles.

DVD singles ó digital videodiscs that typically include two music videos along with extra features ó represent a market that is just beginning to be charted by the music business. Some record labels ó in an industry suffering a two-year sales slump ó hope that the new format can become the modern-day successor to the vinyl 45 single. Retailers, however, are unsure whether to place them in video or audio departments, in part because there is no standard packaging.

A profit, of sorts, for Slate

NY Times: Stop the presses:

In the first quarter of this year, Slate took in more money than it spent.

Of course, given $20 million in investment and all of the traffic-generating muscle of the MSN Network behind it, it is tough to call that fiscal state of affairs profitability ó indeed, company officials are specifically prohibited from doing so because Slate's financials are not broken out in Microsoft's filings. But it is still a milestone for a general-interest magazine that publishes only on the Web.

Good news, and proof, yet again, that platform visibility matters.

Blockbuster to take on Netflix

From Monday's NY Times: Blockbuster said it would introduce an online rental service sometime next year to compete with Walmart.com and Netflix.

HTML email question

A question for anyone who's conversant with HTML email newsletters:

When I want to link to a hotlinked story in an HTML email newsletter, like the one I get from Wired News, I have to click through the link in order to obtain the url (right-clicking the link doesn't let you copy the shortcut).

That's often problematic when I have two or more browser windows open, as I routinely do when I compose my Movable Type weblog. The problem is, half the time, clicking on the link will call up one window, and half the time it will summon up the other browser window -- the one with my half-written entry for my weblog, sometimes wiping out what I've written. There seems to be no rhyme or reason in when one window opens rather than my blog window.

Anyone have a solution to this? Lemme know and I'll post it, or post it below.

Stupid right-wing commentator tricks

Knucklehead talk-show host Michael Savage is threatening to sue SavageStupidity.com for a trademark violation because SavageStupidity.com is "confusingly similar" to MichaelSavage.com.

Revenge of the news control freaks

Lots of opinions kickin' around the blogosphere -- as well as mailing lists -- about the Hartford Courant's insistence that one of its editorial staffers pull the plug on his independent weblog.

Here's an email I just sent to the online-news list:

Let's summarize events to date, shall we?

The travel editor of the Hartford Courant decides to begin writing an independent weblog. He does so on his own time. He uses not a scintilla of the Courant's resources to do so. He does not discuss the Courant or his job at the newspaper in his weblog. He does not leverage his association with the Courant in his blog. He is not freelancing for a competing publication, does not make a penny from his weblog, and in no way competes online with the Courant.

Despite all of the above, the editor of the Courant (in a decision criticized privately by the Courant's newsroom staffers) decides to order the weblog killed because a weblog by a newsroom staffer creates "a parallel journalistic universe" (huh?) "without any editing oversight by the Courant." (Ah! the control freak rationale!) Said Courant editor Brian Toolan, "There are 325 other people here who create similar (Web sites) for themselves."

The horror! The infamy! Just think of it: journalists with opinions! Communicating online with other people like ... like regular human beings!

Dan Gillmor and I often appear at new media conferences where someone in the audience asks, Why don't more journalists have their own weblogs? Well, here's your answer. Toolan and his merry band of fellow control freaks believe that newsroom employees are chattel. Goodness, we can't have journalists expressing views online because then someone somewhere might accuse him or her of not being wholly chaste, objective, devoid of opinions. Well, guess what, friends? Reporters and editors have opinions. They'll always have opinions. Our backgrounds, our views, our intellectual baggage all color our reportage. At the end of the day, what counts is whether our reporting is fair and balanced.

I'll grant that this is a dicey area, one strewn with certain risks for an established media company. Steve Outing, among others, has written about the issues associated with allowing newsroom staffers to maintain weblogs.

I'll also grant that news organizations have a legitimate interest in preventing its news staffers from becoming actively involved in partisan politics or engaging in journalistic conflicts of interest. In that same spirit, you don't write about the subjects of your reportage in your weblog. You don't slam your employer. Those are just common-sense rules that every journalist who maintains a weblog adheres to.

But blogger Denis Horgan did not step over that line. His offense was just *having* a blog.

How far should the Toolan proposition extend? Or, as Eric Meyer put it, how should newspaper codes apply to personal weblogs? "[T]hese codes typically forbid employees to accept
unauthorized freelance assignments, to inject themselves into public debate and to leverage their status as an employee into some outside venture. Any of these three would doubtlessly block an employee from creating a Web log without authorization."

Horgan was not freelancing, so that issue is not applicable here. He was not leveraging his status as an employee into some outside venture, so that doesn't apply as well. (To argue otherwise is to suggest that people would read Horgan's blog only by virtue of his ties to the Courant, when almost none of us knew of such a relationship -- in any event, being a newspaper journalist wins you few kudos in the blogosphere. Such an assumption also presupposes that Horgan's status as a journalist flows solely from his employment with the Courant. Odd, how newspaper execs believe staffers draw their credibility from the paper rather than the reverse.)

Horgan is, however, clearly injecting himself into public debate, on subjects such as the Iraq war and same-sex unions and the Boston Red Sox. So here is where the friction lies.

Under such a curious formulation of newsroom etiquette -- call it the Virginal Journalists Theory (at all costs, newsroom employees must be unsoiled by the tawdriness of public debate) -- where does a controlling newsroom manager draw the line? Ah, things get sticky pretty quickly. Should journalists be forbidden from voting in elections or from registering with a political party (talk about injecting themselves into public debate!). Should they be banned from expressing any opinion on a public website or bulletin board? Should they be penalized for attending or speaking at a city council meeting on a subject unrelated to their beat? Should keeping a diary or journal be verboten if one shows it to one's friends?

Journalist bloggers know that their views, their opinions, the expertise they've built up over a career -- this is what carries weight in the blogosphere. Not hewing to the fiction of being a blank slate.

One solution to this sorry affair would have been to bring Horgan's weblog under the paper's wing. Newspapers continue to miss an opportunity by neglecting to embrace weblogs, which create the opportunity to build a trusting, convivial relationship with the paper's readers and often provide the side bonus of story tips and overlooked angles. Alas, the newspapers' impulse to control is much greater than the impulse to foster a genuine dialogue with readers. ...

Fortunately, it appears that Horgan may be considering pursuing his legal options. Connecticut is the rare state in that its general statutes (ß31-51q) prevent any employer from disciplining an employee for the exercise of First Amendment rights. Shocking as it may seem, a newsroom employee just may enjoy the same First Amendment rights as a waitress, custodian or business executive. At least in Connecticut.

Members of this list often wonder why fewer people trust the news media these days. They wonder why more and more talented journalists are leaving newsrooms. Some of the answers can be gleaned from this single episode of big media hypocrisy and double standards.

OJR's Mark Glaser, incidentally, holds a different view; look for his column on this subject early this week.

Eric rants

Eric Predoehl, a man sometimes called Elvis Presley, has begun a blog, EP-Rants!, about politics, technology, pop culture and the entertainment industry. Looks promising.

Online Anonymity Under Fire

Katie Dean has a story in Wired News on Verizon's courtroom loss to keep an ISP customer's identity out of the music industry's hands, a decision that will make it harder for people to stay anonymous online, privacy advocates say.

Student insult website closed

LA Times: Schoolscandals.com, a website that published crude and malicious rumors about Southern California middle and high school students, was shut down Thursday after a public outcry from parents and students.

Webbys call off live show

You know the dot-com crash has reached its abyss when the Webby Awards calls it quits. The sixth annual show will be held virtually, but the organizers have called off the live event in San Francisco on June 5, because of "the lousy economy, and now, travel fears related to war and SARS."

Borderline plagiarism at the Times

Interesting Editor's Note in the Sunday New York Times Sports section, documenting a case of borderline plagiarism:

A Sports of The Times column on Feb. 12 discussed college coaches who have spoken out against the death penalty, in particular Dean Smith, former basketball coach at the University of North Carolina.

The column should have acknowledged that a central quotation from the coach appeared three days earlier in an article by Bonnie DeSimone of The Chicago Tribune and that several other passages closely reflected her words.

In a first draft, the Times column credited Ms. DeSimone for an anecdote in which Mr. Smith told a former governor of North Carolina, "The death penalty makes us all murderers."

The columnist, Ira Berkow, was told by his editors that a quotation so harsh should rightly be verified firsthand, so he telephoned Mr. Smith, who recounted the scene to him. Editors then deleted the attribution to Ms. DeSimone's article, though Times policy ordinarily calls for crediting news that originates exclusively elsewhere. (Coach Smith's activism had been reported in North Carolina publications, but not in detail comparable to The Tribune's.) The Times column included two passages that were similar in language and concept to those in The Tribune:

The Tribune: "Sports figures, while often active in charitable causes, generally avoid taking sides in divisive, emotional national debates such as the one concerning the death penalty. Coaches for major Division I programs, as Smith was, recruit from a wide swath of the population and have an interest in not alienating people."

The Times: "Sports figures are often reluctant, at best, to go public with potentially divisive national issues, even when the issue is a matter of life and death. . . . For active coaches, coming forward on controversial issues could hamper recruiting if you take a side that may alienate, say, the family of a prospective point guard."

The Tribune: "Smith will not discuss whether he counseled his most famous protÈgÈ, Michael Jordan, during the 1996 trial of the two men who murdered Jordan's father three years before. The Jordan family never made its feelings known regarding punishment, according to Robeson County District Attorney Johnson Britt."

The Times: "Is it possible that Smith, meanwhile, had some influence over the decision of Michael Jordan and his family not to push for the death penalty for the two men who randomly murdered Jordan's father in 1996? Possibly. Smith said that he never spoke to Jordan about it."

The Times column also included this quotation from Mr. Smith about his religious views: "I do not condone any violence against any of God's children, and that is why I am opposed to the death penalty." Though Mr. Smith discussed those views in his Times interview, the exact quotation was taken from his autobiography, "A Coach's Life," and should have been attributed.

Apple's pay music service

NY Times: Apple Computer plans on Monday to introduce a digital music service, according to industry analysts. It is a move that thrusts the company into the middle of a contentious and technologically challenging area of digital commerce.

Judge: File-swapping tools are legal

Fascinating -- and surprising -- breaking news: RIAA, MPAA Lose Suit Against Streamcast and Grokster. From News.com and Slashdot reaction. Here's the judge's opinion (PDF format). Copyfight is on the case, too.

New on OJR

New on OJR:

TV Stations May Finally Get the Point: TV stations have been pretending that their Web counterparts don't exist. But now that advertisers are seeing that they can reach consumers at online news sites, that is likely to change, and sooner than you think.

Weblogs Unite to Protest Detained Iranian Blogger: When Iran detained journalist and blogger Sina Motallebi, it stirred up a protest that's united the Persian and Western blogospheres. But will publicity help or harm him? Top Persian bloggers weigh in.

Lessig on copyright

Stanford prof. Larry Lessig continues to make the rounds on the subject of intellectual property. Yesterday he gave a talk at Northwestern University titled "Is Intellectual Property Copyrightable?" And yesterday he appeared on a taped segment on PBS's NewsHour to discuss piracy and movie & music file trading.

In his talk at Northwestern, a poster on Dave Farber's mailing list reports, Lessig said legislation will be introduced in two weeks or so (perhaps by Rep. Zoe Lofgren) that would require copyright holders to pay $1 to continue copyright protection rather than have property automatically be protected without any kind of registration.

It's a worthy idea, given that so much material is held out of the public domain by default. I doubt Congress will act on it, however.

Management by blog

In Business 2.0 Jimmy Guterman explores how companies might use blogs to help manage their businesses. Worth a read, especially for those in mid- or upper management.

Springsteen on the Dixie Chicks

Here's a courageous statement from Bruce Springsteen on the plight of the Dixie Chucks, who are suffering boycotts of their work by the pro-war jingoists (including faux-patriotic corporate interests) throughout the land:

The Dixie Chicks have taken a big hit lately for exercising their basic right to express themselves. To me, they're terrific American artists expressing American values by using their American right to free speech. For them to be banished wholesale from radio stations, and even entire radio networks, for speaking out is un-American.

The pressure coming from the government and big business to enforce conformity of thought concerning the war and politics goes against everything that this country is about - namely freedom. Right now, we are supposedly fighting to create freedom in Iraq, at the same time that some are trying to intimidate and punish people for using that same freedom here at home.

I don't know what happens next, but I do want to add my voice to those who think that the Dixie Chicks are getting a raw deal, and an un-American one to boot. I send them my support.

Bruce Springsteen

Carl Bernstein steamed over DeepThroatUncovered.com

Guess who wants to discipline the journalism professor whose class created a website to deduce the identity of Deep Throat? None other than Carl Bernstein.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports:

Washington - The Illinois journalism program that had students try to find the identity of the Washington Post's "Deep Throat" informant "should be disaccredited" and the teacher who oversaw the project "should be spanked," said Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters whose stories on the Watergate scandal led to President Nixon's resignation.

"The last thing students in a journalism class should be doing is trying to find out who other reporters' sources are," said Bernstein, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine who broke the stories with colleague Bob Woodward. "They should be learning how to protect sources."

Bernstein's flat-out wrong, of course. If anything, the Univ. of Illinois journalism class is doing a public service by helping to analyze the tactics of one of journalism's most storied investigative teams. And yes, Carl, that means seeing what kind of footprints you left behind.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the pointer.

Meantime, professor Eric Meyer, who helped oversee the project, reports on the online-news list:

In its first two days, the site generated 2,978,517 hits and was visited by 58,333 unique users. ...

Although nearly all reporters who wrote stories about the project visited the site -- and in most cases got copies of the story by e- mail -- the only major organizations that published direct links to the site (that we could find) were the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and Yahoo News. One of those organizations did not initially provide a link. It was added midway through the publication cycle by a former student now working as a producer there. ...

The site was manually designed and executed by 13 students. They used no special database templating systems other than standard Apache server-side includes. What they chose to research and feature and how they chose to design those elements was completely up to them. They worked on the project for less than three weeks.

More on censoring journalists' blogs

Sheila, the ever-savvy blogger for Projo.com, shares some thoughts by email about the line she has set up between her newspaper blog and personal blog, in the wake of the Hartford Courant's clampdown on its travel editor's personal weblog.

How it shakes out for me:

If I have something to say that would involve the "parallel world of the paper," I say it on the paper's blog as a columnist.

The only resource of the paper I use on my personal blog is a few links to clips of my own work that I've fished out of the archives and put on the projo.com website.

Outside activities that are not appropriate to my journal blog go to lennon2.com: A link to brother's project, bringing the USS Saratoga to Quonset Point as a museum. The acknowledgment that I make the union website, within a stark template. A few old clips. Flowers and vacations and personal comments in the big conversation. Photos. Disclosure, really, more than most columnists show.

I didn't subtitle my Journal blog "Bottom-up" journalism from the pros for readers as much as to remind myself where I am when I open that file.

I "simul-blog" some posts that straddle and have wider appeal.

My personal blog languishes a lot. ...

The happy ending here might be to get Denis's blog into the newsroom and "converged" on the road with his travel writing.

That's a good suggestion -- one that I'm sure the Courant will ignore. More and more, with a few exceptioins (such as Sheila and Dan), I'm finding that journalists' personal weblogs are more interesting, insightful and fun to read than the blogs sanctioned by news sites. (See Glenn Reynolds vs. Glenn Reynolds on MSNBC for one example.)

Meantime, feel free to add your own comments here or on Denis Horgan's blog, where readers are expressing shock and awe at the Courant's hubris.

Regarding the suggestions by some readers on Denis' feedback page that journalists ought to write personal weblogs anonymously, or under a pen name: That's a terrible idea, unless it's done with the consent of the news publication's management. Such subterfuge, while understandable, can easily lead to misunderstandings of intent, and result in a suspension or firing -- as already happened once in Texas.

A blog on social software

Corante launches yet another weblog: Many-to-Many: social software, by Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield, SÈbastien Paquet and Jessica Hammer. Impressive lineup. Excerpt:

... What will we be talking about? The term "social software" has been getting a lot of attention in technology circles these days. From the Social Software track at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference to the newly-formed Social Software Alliance, people involved with developing and deploying new technologies are increasingly interested in this topic. (Stay tuned for a post--or a few posts--on definitional issues.)

The growing popularity of blogging as a tool for ad-hoc journalism, academic discourse, and just plain thinking-out-loud has been one of the drivers of this trend. So has the development of new P2P and group-forming technologies--IM clients like Jabber, group-forming web sites like Friendster and Ryze, collaborative document editing tools like Wikis, multiplayer games, and old stand-bys like mailing lists and usenet groups.

The emphasis on communication and collaboration inherent in social software led us to the idea of a group-authored weblog on the topic. Each of us brings a long history of participation in social software environments, and an interest in both the development of tools and the understanding of their uses. Liz, Ross, and Seb are all active bloggers, and while sans blog (until now!), Clay is a well-known thinker and writer in the field.

We plan to use this blog to highlight new developments in the social software field, and also to provide commentary and conversation on the uses of social software in varying contexts. We welcome your participation in these conversations, through the use of comments--a first on a Corante blog.

Esther Dyson joins the blogosphere

Esther Dyson has a blog.

Come join the blogosphere

Malaysian blogger/business columnist Jeff Ooi in Screenshots:

Writer and content strategist Joseph D. Lasica, a Senior Editor of the Online Journalism Review, was thrilled to learn that blogging has taken root in Malaysia and made and mentioned my blog and a related news feature in Star In-Tech that he picked up online. That pushed me onto the blogosphereís radar screen.

US news portal MSNBC soon picked up my blog entry on SARS and related it to how Asians resort to new technologies, blogs and SMS, to access information about the epidemic. This was later picked up by The Agonist, a high-traffic blog in the US. Within 24 hours, it was linked and referred to by Berkeley, California-based blogger Tim Bishop who maintains SARSWatch.org, Hong Kong-based Phil Ingram who maintains Flyingchair.net blog, and Singapore-based legal practitioner Vernon Lee who maintains SARS Info Centre website. ...

Suddenly, I found myself networked to a community that I would not be able to reach out formerly.

Come join blogosphere. You could do even better.

The TypePad Personal Publishing Service

The makers of MovableType are launching an enhanced posting/publishing tool. Here's their press release. Thanks to Dan for the pointer.

Conn. paper tells staffer to kill blog

We knew this day would come. A daily newspaper editor has ordered one of its journalists to suspend his personal weblog.

Editor & Publisher has the details: Hartford Paper Tells Employee to Kill Blog. Travel editor Denis Horgan's weblog "created a parallel journalistic universe where he'll do commentary on institutions that the paper has to cover," says Hartford Courant editor Brian Toolan. (Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.) Excerpt from the E&P article:

Horgan is a former columnist for the paper who was transferred to the travel writing position earlier this year.

After losing his column, Horgan decided to set up his own Web page, where he has commented on everything from baseball to the Iraqi information minister to same-sex unions. "It kept me happy and gave me a chance to keep doing things that I wanted to do," Horgan told E&P Online. "I do it on my own time, from my own house. I'm not competing with the Courant. I'm not looking for advertisers." ...

But Toolan sees it differently. "Denis Horgan's entire professional profile is a result of his attachment to The Hartford Courant, yet he has unilaterally created for himself a parallel journalistic universe where he'll do commentary on the institutions that the paper has to cover without any editing oversight by the Courant," Toolan said. "That makes the paper vulnerable."

The editor added that allowing an employee to set up his own opinion blog was a bad precedent. "There are 325 other people here who could create similar [Web sites] for themselves," Toolan said.

Denis Horgan writes on his weblog:

It is with the most profound regret that I am compelled to announce that the editor of The Hartford Courant, a proud and wonderful newspaper of which I am honored to count myself a staff member, has ruled that I am no longer allowed to operate a column on this web page. Despite the fact that this page is operated on my own time and at my own expense, that it does not compete with the newspaper or draw upon any of its resources, the editor has ruled that its operation is a conflict of interest. It is not my role to explain this decision, one with which I disagree deeply, but I have no option but to suspend the column or commentary activities here. The page will remain open as I explore my rights and options. The "Feedback" exchange function will continue should anyone wish to continue to discuss matters of interest. The links to other columnists, services and the Bill of Rights will also remain open for those wishing to explore them.

I am very sorry that things have reached this stage and that the promise with which this effort was launched has been extinguished. To me, it seemed like such a good idea.

Thank you for your support
Denis Horgan

I'm often asked at new media conferences why more journalists don't have personal weblogs. Why? Here's a perfect example: the thuggish mindset of the Courant's editor. The notion that newspapers can exercise ownership rights over employees who choose to write and publish personal commentary on their own time, at their homes, without relying on company resources. I don't know Denis Horgan, but I suspect he didn't emerge as a journalist merely by virtue of his ties to the Hartford Courant (which belongs to the otherwise reasonably enlightened Tribune Co. chain). The Courant enjoys its journalistic prestige from employees like Horgan, not the other way around.

If you read Denis' postings, you'll see a heartfelt and insightful series of entries on dozens of topics that have nothing to do with the travel section of the Hartford Courant. But they do have to do with subjects of interest to the blogosphere -- the Red Sox, conspiracy buffs, the hum of everyday life.

I'm incensed by the Courant's hamfisted attempt at censorship here. I hope Denis exercises his rights (I believe the Courant is a Guild shop) under the law. It's likely that he would win his case in court, if he chooses to go that route. This isn't even a close call, given that he's not freelancing for a competing publication, he's blogging. I'm sure the Courant will come back with some nonsense about how employees abandon their rights when they become employees at a major media organization. That's utter nonsense, of course.

I've sent emails off to Letters@courant.com and associate editor Karen Hunter, the paper's reader representative (phone (800) 524-4242, ext. 3902). I urge you to do the same.

Later: Here's the take on this from Cosmo Macero Jr. of the Boston Herald.

And from Dan Gillmor. And Derek Willis in The Scoop.

Verizon must reveal song swapper names

Breaking news from Reuters via Yahoo: A U.S. court said on Thursday that Verizon Communications must reveal the names of customers suspected of downloading copyrighted songs from the Internet without permission.

Here's the EFF's take: Court Gives Hollywood Broad Powers to Violate Your Privacy.

High Court considers speech by Nike

Fascinating issue taken up by the US Supreme Court in oral arguments yesterday. At issue: whether statements by Nike about its business practices amount to advertising or protected commercial speech. The Washington Post has the lowdown.

SF Chron reporter fired

Henry Norr, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter suspended after being arrested at a rally opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was fired Wednesday.

Blindsided by bandwidth fees

Glenn writes in the New York Times today about his experience in dodging a $15,000 bandwidth bullet. Interesting, and a good warning.

Burn, mix, back up

NY Times: Burn, Mix, Copy, Back Up: A short article on a software suite that does it all.

The era of the shiny silver disc is flourishing now that compact discs and DVD's have become standard mediums for listening to music, watching movies and storing more data than that drawer of old diskettes. For those who have the power to burn but are not yet sure what they want to do with that CD or DVD recorder, a software suite from Pinnacle Systems can handle just about any audio, video or system backup project that might come to mind.

An electronic tag for Fido

NY Times: An electronic tag for your pet.

Rheingold on the 'end of innovation'

Wired News reports from the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference, with a spotlight on author Howard Rheingold, who warns that technologists' freedom to innovate is under attack from governments and corporate interests. He tells programmers and developers to protect their interests in the political process.

Google buys Applied Semantics

Google acquires Applied Semantics.

Appointed by America

The Onion: New Fox reality show to determine ruler of Iraq.