A new LA media blog

Here's a new LA media blog: L.A. Observed, by Kevin Roderick. The lead item today concerns a memo by L.A. Times editor John Carroll on liberal bias. I'll be adding it to my blogroll in the coming days.

News sites' standards get loose

Steve Outing in E&P: Newspapers' Taste Standards Get Loose Online. Some Web Sites Push the Envelope. It opens with my backyard paper:

When the "Bay to Breakers" community road race in San Francisco was covered this year, SFGate.com, the Web site of the San Francisco Chronicle, ran a photo of nude male runners -- showing their bare backsides -- prominently on the home page. The print edition of the Chronicle took a more conservative approach, publishing photos of runners wearing underwear and fake fig leaves. This newspaper Web site and others apply far different taste standards online than in print -- even though the sites are operated by the same newspaper companies. It's part of an effort by publishers to attract younger audiences.

NYT drops its free news tracker

Oh, no. The NY Times is following the lead of the LA Times and ending its free news tracker service. Just got this notice from the Times:

As of June 13, 2003, Times News Tracker will be available to paying subscribers only and the original free service will be suspended. ...

The fee for the enhanced service is $19.95 per year.

I liked the old service just fine, thank you. But gotta keep those shareholders happy!

Apple pulls plug on Rendezvous

Interesting development with Apple and its iTunes Music Store. Today's NY Times carries a story about Apple's decision to pull the plug on Rendezvous:

... [I]t would not be an online success story without a complicating twist. That complication came this week when the specter of the music industry, which has been publicly supportive of iTunes, began to loom over Apple. The success of iTunes, after all, depends on cooperation from the music business, which controls the songs that iTunes wants in its collection. Apparently trying to stay in the record industry's good graces, iTunes removed a service it had previously offered customers. Called Rendezvous, the service enabled listeners and their friends to access one another's music and listen to it ó but not download it ó from any computers. Hackers, however, had figured out how to download the music as well, creating programs with names like iLeach and iSlurp. So on Tuesday Apple sent out an update for its iTunes software, disabling Rendezvous and limiting music access to a user's local network at home or at work.

In a statement released yesterday, Apple said Rendezvous had been "used by some in ways that have surprised and disappointed us."

"We designed it to allow friends and family to easily stream (not copy) their music between computers at home or in a small group setting, and it does this well," the statement said. "But some people are taking advantage of it to stream music over the Internet to people they do not even know. This was never the intent." A spokesman for Apple, Chris Bell, said the company made the decision by itself.

FCC decision: cutting off debate

Washington Post: In recent days, the FCC -- about to make a decision about the easing of media ownership rules -- has been inundated with hundreds of thousands of e-mails and e-petitions urging the agency to put off a decision. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Why does Blair fascinate us?

LA Times: Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass have the attention of columnists, magazine covers and bloggers -- because "we have a fascination with people who break the rules." Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

The saddest bloggers in the land

The saddest bloggers in the land must be the four newspaper bloggers at the Albuquerque Journal who reside behind a paid registration wall, meaning that their blogs are visible only to the hundreds or few thousand souls who ponied up for a subscription to the ABQjournal. (To spot 'em, scroll 2/3rds of the way down the right nav.) This is speculation, but a blogger who's cut off from the blogosphere has got to feel a bit unspecial.

Jury slams eBay with $35 million verdict

Bloomberg News: eBay Inc. was ordered to pay $35 million yesterday [Tuesday] after a federal jury in Norfolk, Va., said that it was impermissibly using a company's innovations for conducting sales over the Internet.

What utter nonsense, and yet another indication that the patent system is out of control.

eBay's crime? Introducing a "buy it now" option for its auctions.

Record labels not into digital distribution

Wired News: Industry watchers say the decision by Sony and UMG to sell their service Pressplay to Roxio indicates that the major labels are turning away from distributing music online. By letting someone else "own the highway," they can still reap some of the profits.

Debunking pseudoscience

Archaeology magazine takes a look at how a group of fed-up archaeology buffs launched a Web site to help debunk ìalternative histories,î such as ancient space travel and the existence of Atlantis. The article also features a list of the top five pseudoarchaeological sites and the top five sites that refute them. Good stuff.

Disney is thinking inside the box

Jon Healey in the LA Times: Attempting to bypass the middlemen, the entertainment giant will test a service that beams movies into homes.

Hoo boy

Baltimore Sun: Journalism the 'Right' Way. Groups are teaching students to start their own conservative newspapers, with the long-term goal of altering the basic makeup of professional news outlets.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Suspended N.Y. Times Reporter Says He'll Quit

Washington Post: Suspended Putlizer Prize winner Rick Bragg says a "poisonous atmosphere" has descended on the New York Times, one that prompted the paper to suspend him for practices he considers routine.

Here's CJR on Bragg's suspension.

And it gets uglier: NY Post: Four New York Times reporters under investigation for Jayson Blair-like abuses have "banded together" and may sue the paper if their names are leaked, says a source.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointers.

Spam and local radio

From today's San Jose Merc:

Editorial: Congressional bill to kill spam would do the opposite.

Brad Kava: Taking the 'local' out of radio programming.

Bush Tax Cuts Will Do a Number on Us

Op-ed piece by James K. Galbraith in Newsday. Take a look at Texas as a preview of what's ahead for the nation.

Some new additions to J-Log

kpaul has launched a couple of enhancements to the J-Log (J as in journalism): A My J-Log page that lets you customize your page, and a page devoted to the fine art of webmastering.

Probing the whys of digital editions

Holiday weekend update: Took our 4-year-old to Fairyland in Oakland yesterday and the San Ramon Kite Festival today. All three of us are wiped out.

Tomorrow morning I begin writing a piece on newspaper digital editions, or electronic replicas offered by companies such as NewsStand. Anybody bloggers ever read these things?

A look at photo blogs

Sunday's NY Times takes a look at photo blogs. Among those mentioned:

www.fotolog.net/

www.lightningfield.com

www.hunkabutta.com

www.fotolog.net/lauratitian

www.textism.com/oliver

PopTech sets lineup for October

PopTech has published this announcement of its program for this fall:

Pop!Tech Unveils 2003 'Sea Change' Conference.

CAMDEN, Maine -- Pop!Tech, the world's premier conference exploring the impact of technology on society and the future, today unveiled its 2003 program, outside program chair, and new speakers for its fall conference, taking place October 16 - 19, 2003 in Camden, Maine. ...

Penn State prez on file sharing

Penn State President Graham B. Spanier, a leading figure in addressing the issue of file sharing on university campuses, discussed the topic May 22 in an online chat session hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's the transcript. Spanier shared his thoughts on how colleges should resolve the problem of file sharing on campuses, and whether or not it is a problem they should deal with at all. Spanier currently co-chairs a joint committee of the higher education and entertainment communities. In addition, here's the text of his recent testimony on peer-to-peer file sharing on campuses before the U.S. Congress.

Here's an excerpt from the chat:

Spanier: I don't think universities should block all P2P file sharing, since it is a legitimate technology that can have important uses, especially for research, collaboration, and education. The problem is how to prevent inappropriate uses, such as pirated music, videos, movies, and software. Few universities at this point actually block such material, and it is debatable whether there is a technology out there that could prevent a determined person from gaining access to what he or she wants. But there is pressure from Congress and from the owners of IP to block piracy.

And here's the Chronicle of Higher Ed's story: A President Tries to Settle the Controversy Over File Sharing. Penn State's Graham Spanier wants to make a deal with the music industry.

From across the media landscape

Recent pointers in IWantMedia:

Jimmy Guterman in Business 2.0: Return of the Dotcom Media Flameouts. The Wall Street Journal Online is adopting blogging conventions for its reporting.

Penton Media: The monthly print edition of Internet World will be discontinued with some services continuing on the magazine's website and email newsletter.

Columbia Journalism Review: The Lies We Bought: The Unchallenged 'Evidence' for War. The success of "Bush's PR War" was dependent on a compliant press that uncritically reported many fraudulent administration claims.

Business Week: The Faint, Fading Voice of the Left. Conservative voices in American media will become even louder if FCC chairman Michael Powell succeeds in easing ownership rules.

New York Daily News: College students shouting "God Bless America" pulled the plug on a New York Times reporter who gave an anti-war speech at an Illinois graduation.

Sad times we live in.

Colorful

Eco Latino.

In your dreams, W.

What utterly preposterous gall.

Here's PBS's Online NewsHour with a segment on the White House's efforts to manage the message.

And as for a real patriot, here's Bill Moyers on candor in journalism and Memorial Day 2003.

Is a wi-fi bubble building?

News analysis in Business Week: Is a Wi-Fi Bubble Building? As one of tech's few growth areas, it's luring startups and VC cash -- in a familiar pattern. First to feel a pop may be consumer outfits.

Armies of the Right

Scary stuff: Armies of the Right: What campus conservatives learned from the '60s generation. In Sunday's NY Times Magazine.

Disposable DVDs go to the dumps

Katie Dean in Wired News: Environmentalists have one word about one movie studio's plans to market disposable DVDs: nuts.

What we have here is a solution in search of a problem.

Will the FCC add to media monopoly?

William Safire: The Great Media Gulp. Excerpt:

Many artists, consumers, musicians and journalists know that such protestations of cable and Internet competition by the huge dominators of content and communication are malarkey. The overwhelming amount of news and entertainment comes via broadcast and print. Putting those outlets in fewer and bigger hands profits the few at the cost of the many.

Does that sound un-conservative? Not to me. The concentration of power ó political, corporate, media, cultural ó should be anathema to conservatives. The diffusion of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual participation, is the essence of federalism and the greatest expression of democracy.

Why do we have more channels but fewer real choices today? Because the ownership of our means of communication is shrinking. Moguls glory in amalgamation, but more individuals than they realize resent the loss of local control and community identity. ...

ReplayTV may strip ad skipping

Here's a big loss for the viewing public: ReplayTV May Strip Ad Skipping.

ReplayTV said it would likely leave some controversial features on its home television recording machines for now but may strip them from new models.

ReplayTV, the digital video recorder maker purchased last month by Japan's D&M Holdings from bankrupt Sonicblue (SBLU), said it is mulling the fate of ReplayTV's features that skip commercials and send saved programs over the Internet.

Tim Berners-Lee on the web's future

Wired News reports from Budapest: Tim Berners-Lee, the man who dreamed up the World Wide Web, is worried that commercial interests threaten the future of the Internet. Speaking at the International World Wide Web Conference, he offers a possible solution.

New movies section at NYT

The NY Times has launched an ambitious national Movies section. The section includes:

• National Showtimes and Ticketing: Find a movie and buy your tickets right on the spot.

• Rate and Review: Rate movies and write your own reviews.

• Critics' Picks: Find movies recommended by New York Times critics including The Times's "Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made."

• Review Archive: A complete list of New York Times movie reviews dating back to 1983, as well as selected reviews back to 1929.

• Box-Office Charts: Weekend and all-time data for the U.S. and Canada, New York City and the U.K.

• DVD/Home Video: A complete section devoted to new releases.

Gotta like it. This was something city guides were good at. Glad to see the Times get ambitious here.

Hi-def camcorders and going digital underwater

Two David Pogue articles in today's Circuits section of the NY Times:

The High-Definition Camcorder Enters the Picture

Digital Underwater Photography, with shots of his snorkeling safari on his personal site. Nice. And here's Canon's meaty guide to underwater digital photography.

Also in Circuits:

A browser that shrinks web pages. Opera, a Norwegian company known for its Web browser for full-size computers, has introduced a new browser for some Nokia mobile phones.

False Web Ratings (in recommendation systems) Swing Opinion, Study Says

Annika Sorenstam shoots a 71

One minute ago, Annika Sorenstam shot a 71 in her opening round of the Colonial. She played well, but bogeyed the last hole to finish one above par. She said earlier that she hoped to shoot "around par," so this was a good day for her. The announcers on the USA network said she's got a 50-50 chance to make the final cut tomorrow and play through Sunday. I hope she does well.

The Web vs. big media

In Salon's continuing brilliant series on media consolidation, it brings us: Can the Web beat Big Media? FCC czar Michael Powell says new technologies will let diversity flourish even as giant corporations consolidate their control over TV and newspapers. Dream on.

New effort to monitor TV content

I'm 200+ emails behind due to pressing deadlines, and I've missed posting a number of articles I found interesting, so I hope you'll forgive my transgressions in the cathedral of blogging.

Meantime, in Wednesday's NY Times: A New Attempt to Monitor Media Content. A new group, called Common Sense Media, is introducing a Web-based media ratings system, devised with help from the publishers of the Zagat guides, that will rank entertainment products based on language, violence, sexual content and adult themes.

Einstein's genius lives on -- online

NY Times: Now on the Web, a Peek Into Einstein's Thoughts, Excerpt:

Yesterday the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University and the California Institute of Technology, where the Einstein Papers Project has its headquarters, started a new Web site, www.alberteinstein.info.

It contains digitized images of some 900 Einstein papers as well as a searchable list of 43,000 documents in the archive. ...

The online collection includes all 230 original scientific manuscripts and drafts that were in his possession when he died ...

Among them, she said, is a notebook in which he worked out his general theory of relativity, which explained gravity as the warping of space-time geometry and is generally regarded as his greatest achievement. The notebook has been intently studied by historians in recent years.

In addition there are about 700 nonscientific writings and speeches and fragments from his travel diaries kept during trips to the United States, Japan and South America, among other places.

'Star Wars Kid' gets bucks from blogs

Wired News:

A couple of webloggers are raising money for an unfortunate teenager humiliated worldwide after a private video of his energetic lightsaber moves was leaked to the Net.

Webloggers Andy Baio and Jish Mukerji launched a fundraiser Friday for the young man they call the "Star Wars Kid," whose home video has been downloaded millions of times and watched by people all over the world. ...

By Friday afternoon, the webloggers' fund had received more than 100 individual donations totaling nearly $1,000.

On Google, blogs and web publishing

Doc jumps into the fray on such matters at Dan's piece on OhmyNews and the twin pieces in the NY Times yesterday with this theme, says Doc:

Both carry a subtext that says bloggers aren't serious, and blogging is not Serious Journalism. Also that blogging is, in some way, a threat.

Related to all this, somehow, is Jonathan Peterson's Amateur Hour entry today, Embraceable News, in which he has some advice for big-media publishers, to wit:

In short, the problem isn't blogs or Google, the problem is that large publishers are unwilling to embrace the web. The way to fix that is for publishers to make changes, not Google. Use mod_rewrite to hide that ugly CMS, put content in it's permanent location the FIRST time you publish it, let the search spiders walk your site, read some documentation about search engine placement, leave your archive content visible. Or don't.

Doc has more on printwashing here, with the bottom line:

In the age of the Web, the practice of charging for access to digital archives is a collossal anachronism. It's time for The New York Times and the other papers to step forward, join the real world and correct the problem. Expose the archives. Give them permanent URLs. Let in the bots. Let their writers, and their reputations, accept the credit they are constantly given and truly deserve.

Steven Johnson on blog space

Steven Johnson in Wired: BLOG SPACE: Public Storage For Wisdom, Ignorance, and Everything in Between. Excerpt:

What happens when you start seeing the Web as a matrix of minds, not documents? Networks based on trust become an essential tool. You start evaluating the relevance of data based not on search query results but on personal testimonies.

Napster reborn?

Amy Harmon in today's NY Times: Deal May Raise Napster From Online Ashes.

But Wired News is a step ahead, announcing:

Software maker Roxio said Monday it has acquired for about $40 million the online music service pressplay, a venture jointly owned by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.

Roxio, best known for its CD-burning software, owns the Napster brand and is expected to relaunch pressplay under the name that set Internet music file-swapping in motion.

Indie journalism fueled by reader donations

Interesting things going on in Maine. Freelance journalist-blogger David Appel made an appeal to his readers for him to pursue an investigative story. On first blush, it's highly unorthodox for a journalist to ask readers to pony up money for a piece of journalism. On second blush, isn't that what newspaper publishers do every day?

Here's the story from David, from Blogads, and from kpaul. Excerpt from Blogads:

Wednesday, journalist/blogger David Appel pitched his blog readers to support a story filled with "big politics, big science, and big money."

David has been investigating a sugar lobbying group's attempt to get Congress to kill funding for the WHO, which offended the sugar daddies. "Usually, at this point I'd query editors of various magazines and, usually, get assigned an 800 word story or so, paying anywhere from $400 to $1,000 or more."

Instead, he asked 40 readers to donate $5 each, so he can publish the story on his blog. $200 "is a fraction of what I'd usually get for this type of work, but I want to try it for the idea of it all." David is "a full-time freelance science journalist living in southern Maine... has appeared in Scientific American, Salon, New Scientist, Nature, Audubon, the Boston Globe, Discover, Psychology Today, and many other publications."

Blogs redraw the cultural map

More from today's Sunday NY Times:

As Google Goes, So Goes the Nation

A New York State of Blog (a profile of Nick Denton's Gawker)

Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It. Excerpt:

While personal blogs have been around for years, their proliferation has caused a wrinkle in the social fabric among people in their teens, 20's and early 30's. Inundated with bloggers, they are finding that every clique now has its own Matt Drudge, someone capable of instantly turning details of their lives into saucy Internet fare.

"It's like all your friends are reporters now," said Douglas Rushkoff, a blogger and author of "Media Virus" and other books about the impact of technology on society.

In the rush to publish, many bloggers are running headlong into some of the problems conventionally published memoirists know too well: hurt feelings, newly wary friends and relatives, and the occasional inflamed employer.

"All writing is a form of negotiation between the reader and writer over what constitutes responsibility," said David Weinberger, author of "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," a book about the Internet. "Because blogs are a new form, the negotiation can easily go awry."

Mr. Weinberger said the confessional nature of many blogs had "redrawn the line between what's private and public."

The most curious factoid in the article was the statement by Nick Denton that there are "three million active blogs online." But Nick didn't say that. As he notes, only about 20 percent of those 3 million blogs are active. The Times will likely not publish a correction, and other media outlets will doubtless now pick up on the wildly inaccurate 3 million blogs figure.

Citizen journalism in South Korea

Dan Gillmor is just back from South Korea and files this report in today's San Jose Merc: A new brand of journalism is taking root in South Korea. Excerpt:

OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century's journalism-as-lecture model, where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn't, into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic.

The influence of OhmyNews is substantial, and expanding. It's credited with having helped elect the nation's current president, Roh Moo Hyun, who ran as a reformer. Roh granted his first post-election interview to the publication, snubbing the three major conservative newspapers that have dominated the print-journalism scene for years.

Even taxi drivers who don't have time for newspapers have heard of OhmyNews. The site draws millions of visitors daily.

How Wal-Mart shapes cultural tastes

The Sunday NY Times has a story on the impact of Wal-Mart and the other big discount chains on American popular culture. Excerpt:

Music executives say the chains have helped turn country performers like the Dixie Chicks, Toby Keith and Faith Hill into superstars. And major book publishers say the growth of the mass merchandisers has helped produce a string of best sellers by conservative authors like Bernard Goldberg, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage and Bill O'Reilly.

The growing clout of Wal-Mart and the other big discount chains ó they now often account for more than 50 percent of the sales of a best-selling album, more than 40 percent for a best-selling book, and more than 60 percent for a best-selling DVD ó has bent American popular culture toward the tastes of their relatively traditionalist customers.

"They have obviously reached the Bush-red audience in a big way," said Laurence J. Kirshbaum, chairman of AOL Time Warner's books unit ...

The DVD wars

From Reuters in Wired News today:

Hollywood Expands DVD Dupes War
Major movie studios launch a lawsuit in New York against five makers of DVD copying software as a similar court battle continues in California. Film makers call the products illegal, while software companies say "fair use" provisions of copyright law protect their offerings.

This DVD Will Self-Destruct
Disney found a way to rent DVDs without needing a system to get the discs back. Using self-destruction technology, Disney will begin "renting" DVDs this August that become unplayable after two days and do not have to be returned.

New media sessions in Berkeley

UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism is sponsoring another even-filled new media week. The sessions will focus on multimedia, convergence and online publishing:

Monday, May 19
Doing Weblogs for Newspapers and Local News Sites
7:00 ‚- 8:15 p.m.
- Ken Sands, managing editor of online and new media, The Spokane Spokesman-Review
- Paul Andrews, technology columnist for the Seattle Times and author of The Paul Wall Weblog

Tuesday, May 20
Charging for Online Content
12:45 -‚ 1:45 p.m.
- Peter Krasilovsky, vice president and senior partner, Borrell Associates

The Daily Routine of Internet Users: The Day-Part Survey
7:00 - 8:15 p.m.
- Rusty Coats, director of new media, Mori Research

Wednesday, May 21
Online Advertising and Revenue: The Personal Shopper
7:00 - 8:15 p.m.
- Bob Cauthorn, vice president of digital media, San Francisco Chronicle

Thursday, May 22
Doing a Multimedia Project
1:00 ‚ - 2:15 p.m.
- Robyn Dochterman, interactive editor, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Friday, May 23
Putting Multimedia Into Practice: Deadline Stories and Projects
1:30 - 5:00 p.m.
- Rob Curley, general manager, World Online, the Internet division of The Lawrence Journal-World

All the presentations are free and no RVSP is necessary. Each presentation will be in the library at the UC Berkeley Journalism School in North Gate Hall. Directions are available here.

The presentations also will be Webcast live here.
The sessions are sponsored by the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and USC Annnenberg School for Communication.

FCC: Public Be Damned

The Nation: Consumer and public-interest groups say FCC chairman Michael Powell hasn't allowed enough scrutiny of the impact to to democracy from easing media ownership rules.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

ONA conference set for November

Early-bird registration is now open for the fourth annual Online News Association Conference and Awards Banquet, to be held in Chicago on November 14-15, 2003.

As usual, the prices are absurdly high for any journalist or student whose news organization won't spring for the costs: $300 for journalists who belong to ONA, $475 for non-members, $100-$200 for students, with all those prices going up after Aug. 31.

The dullest blog in the world

The NY Times profiles a British blogger who writes the dullest blog in the world.

I guess irony isn't dead.

Why the RIAA loves tech

RIAA chief Hilary Rosen has a piece in Business 2.0: Why the Recording Industry Loves Tech. Forget what you've heard -- the RIAA believes technology holds the key to music's future. All you have to do is give that future a chance.

Court hears DVD copying dispute

Wired News: A federal judge listened to arguments Thursday in a lawsuit filed by Hollywood studios against a maker of DVD-copying software. The case could determine whether DVD owners can legally copy portions of videos. Katie Dean reports. Excerpt:

Russell Frackman, an attorney for the Motion Picture Association of America argued that the "321 product mimics and copies the CSS authentication," the encryption lock that is encoded on his client's DVDs, thereby bypassing security settings. The DMCA prohibits this, he argued.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it is illegal to bypass any technical measures that control access to copyrighted materials. The law also bans any technology that can circumvent these mechanisms.

But Daralyn Durie, attorney for 321 Studios said the court should take into consideration that the intended users of its products have already purchased the DVDs from which they are reproducing content.

"The DMCA has to be read to allow users access to encrypted content if they have the right to access it, if it is purchased," Durie said.

She argued that once a consumer buys a DVD, there is no license to tell them what they can and cannot do. They own the DVD. Durie compared an encrypted DVD to an antique, locked chest, explaining that if the item is purchased, the owner has the right to break the lock and access what's inside.

A fascinating -- and important -- groundbreaking case in the digital rights wars.

Search results clogged by blogs

Wired News: While many commercial websites struggle to be noticed, some bloggers are unintentionally attracting lots of hits. Their daily utterances, even on topics they know nothing about, are generating high traffic from search engine queries.

Stick a stake in the Lakers

Here in Northern California, we watched the lunar eclipse usher in a new era as we drank a toast to the demise of the most arrogant team in professional sports. And most pampered. As the ESPN sportscasters summed up the loss during a too-lengthy obituary tonight: "You half expected David Stern to run onto the court and say, 'Wait a minute! Best of nine!' "

The false dynasty is no more.

On wireless and convergence

Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org has some good new postings about the TV Meets the Web Seminar and the IFRA online trends conference in Amsterdam, where the emphasis was on wireless.

Showdown at the FCC

On PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer today: The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote early next month on whether to allow companies to own more media outlets in a single market to expand into more media markets. The proposed changes would mark the most significant revision to media ownership regulations in a generation.

Blair may cash in on Times scandal

More on the Jason Blair reporting scandal at the NY Times:

NY Times: Editor of Times Tells Staff He Accepts Blame for Fraud. The Times' town-hall style meeting was closed to news coverage. As a result, Jacques Steinberg, The Times's media writer, was not allowed to attend it.

Newsday: Trying Times For Executive Editor. Times insiders say the Jayson Blair case is galvanizing opposition to Howell Raines.

Reuters: NY Times Editors Meet with Angry Staff Over Scandal. Howell Raines, who was asked if he considering resigning, says he plans to stay on, and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. says he wouldn't accept his resignation.

Raines admits, "I was guilty of a failure of vigilance." Still, Blair's actions were so beyond the pale for a journalist that I have a hard time siding with those who want to lay the blame at Raines' feet.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointers.

Meantime, here's the latest:

Reuters: Jayson Blair, who resigned as a national reporter for the New York Times amid charges he plagiarized and falsified stories, is taking steps to cash in on the scandal, the Daily News reported on Thursday.

Blair may not miss his Times paycheck for long after hiring literary agency David Vigliano Associates to explore book and TV deals, according to the newspaper.

I hope Blair's efforts to profit off his heinous behavior crash and burn (even though I have high regard for David Vigliano, who was the agent for my novel).

Jason, take some time off, travel, see the world, get your head together. But a tell-all of your lies and deceit isn't worthy even of the Fox network.

Watching rental films on the PC

NY Times Circuits columnist David Pogue sizes up the two online movie-rental services: Movielink and CinemaNow. His bottom line:

There's a key difference between the movie-download sites and the music-download sites, however: the music sites show a glimmer of promise.

How CinemaNow stays in business is a marvel. The site is so marred by typos and poor programming, it could have been a high school sophomore's first Web design project. After you provide your credit-card information during the registration process, you're asked for it again on the next screen, and yet again each time you buy a movie. It's like a hovering Blockbuster employee who follows you around the store, asking every 30 seconds: "And you're sure you can pay for this, right?" ...

It boggles the mind that these services don't exploit the potential of the Internet. Any number of improvements could make them more attractive than other video outlets. Online movie stores could offer tens of thousands of movies, dwarfing the selection of video stores. Digital rentals could last two weeks, not 24 hours, without costing the companies a penny more. And there should be a choice of download speeds; people willing to wait longer for superior quality should be allowed to. It is executives, not technology, who keep these services from greater success.

Saving Private Lynch story 'flawed'

BBC News Online:

Private Jessica Lynch became an icon of the war, and the story of her capture by the Iraqis and her rescue by US special forces became one of the great patriotic moments of the conflict.

But her story is one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived. ...

Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital. ...

"It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital - action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan." ...

Thanks to Hylton for the pointer.

Meantime, comes this book news:

The Iraqi lawyer who provided maps to lead Marines in their rescue of Private Jessica Lynch Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief's RESCUE IN NASIRIYA: The Untold Story of American P.O.W. Jessica Lynch's Harrowing Ordeal and the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Save Her, to David Hirshey at Harper, in a significant deal for nearly $500,000.

Game over for mod chips?

MIT's Technology Review: As an underground culture in game machine-tweaking hardware runs afoul of federal law, copyright protection is clashing with user innovation.

Citizen-reporters in South Korea

USA Today has picked up on the story about citizen reporters writing for a South Korean news publication.

Will gaming drive the move to DRM computing?

Wired News: Got Game? Might Need a New PC.

The article doesn't mention this, but the natural desire to play the latest and greatest computer games and dabble in other cutting-edge multimedia forms will be a big motivation for users who otherwise wouldn't buy the coming breed of computers with increased digital rights management restrictions. It's likely that the marketplace will continue to offer essentially three choices: the near-universal Windows platform with Palladium, the limited-DRM Mac, or DRM-free Linux.

Palladium getting a bad rap?

Wired News: Privacy experts warn that Microsoft's Next Generation Secure Computing Base, also known as Palladium, could enable content providers to enforce draconian copyright protections. But a Microsoft representative says don't believe the hype.

Media deregulation still on course

More on the FCC's plans to ease media ownership rules on June 2, which would pave the way for greater media concentration:

Philadelphia Inquirer: The media have failed to inform the public about the implications of media deregulation, let alone how their own companies stand to benefit, writes Jeff Chester.

CBS.MarketWatch.com: Delay Sought in FCC's Media Vote.

That won't happen. The zealots at the helm of the FCC plan to steamroll this through, regardless of its impact on the public.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Meantime, on a related theme, Paul Krugman in the NY Times:

We don't have censorship in this country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.

A TiVo takeover for Apple?

John Battelle in Business 2.0: TiVo is ripe for a takeover, and Apple's Steve Jobs is "the only man in techland who can stand up to the content companies," he writes. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Blair Watch: NYT to hold 'dramatic' staff meeting

The NY Daily News reports today:

The New York Times executive editor Howell Raines plans to enter the lion's den today by holding a town hall meeting where reporters and editors are expected to vent their anger about how he has handled the Jayson Blair scandal.

With an immediate need to stem mounting outrage, Raines scrapped plans yesterday to hold a series of small-group meetings and announced that he, along with managing editor Gerald Boyd and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., would appear before one large gathering.

Several staffers described the newsroom situation as chaotic and suggested that some senior editors needed to be penalized for a catastrophic failure in management that has made all reporters' work suspect.

In a preview of what the power trio may face today, journalists in The Times' Washington bureau met yesterday and voiced frustration at how several warnings about Blair's sloppy reporting were ignored by Raines and Boyd.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Daypop in Google's shadow

Mark Glaser in OJR: Can Daypop Stay Out of Google's Headlights? Wherein Mark interviews the founder of Daypop:

... Daypop lives on in the shadow of the giant. [Google] Most people who use Daypop probably have no idea that it was started and maintained by one man, programmer and game designer Dan Chan. Chan wanted to follow the soap opera of the 2000 U.S. presidential elections while living in Hong Kong, but couldn't find a variety of news sources by searching online. So after moving back to Los Angeles, he took six months to do the coding work for Daypop, launching it in August 2001 as a way to search Weblogs and news. A mention of Daypop in the Wall Street Journal brought his traffic to its current level of about 50,000 page views per day.

Public OK with Bennett's gambling

The Gallup Organization finds: The news media have had a field day with moralist William J. Bennett's recent admission -- and subsequent renunciation -- of high-stakes gambling, pointing to the apparent contradiction between Bennett's behavior and words. But Gallup's annual survey on America's values and beliefs suggests that most Americans may not view Bennett's behavior as inconsistent with his emphasis on moral living. The survey, conducted May 5-7, shortly after Bennett's gambling was first reported in the news, finds 63% of Americans saying gambling is morally acceptable, while just 34% say it is morally wrong.

I'm not sure the news media -- those dens of iniquity -- are suggesting that gambling is morally suspect. They are saying that Bennett's holier-than-thou piety and faux virtuousness smack of hypocrisy.

Meantime, the Gallup Organization has launched improvements to its Tuesday Briefing news service. Sayeth the Gallup folks:

Tuesday Briefing comes with more in-depth content and improved site navigation. The new features include expanded streaming video offerings, improved search functionality -- including an innovative ìdashboardî to ease navigation in the unequalled Gallup Brain archive -- and two new weekly columns offering analysis of Gallup data and findings.

I'll be checking it out.

'Matrix Reloaded' reviewed

Here are some reviews of The Matrix Reloaded:

Joe Baltake (my ol' bud) in The Sacramento Bee: 3 1/2 stars. "What seemed like faux braininess in the first movie comes off as genuine here."

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: 3 1/2 stars. "An immensely skillful sci-fi adventure."

Kenneth Turan in the LA Times: The film packs a visceral visual wallop, but lacks emotional power.

Bruce Newman in the San Jose Merc: 3 stars.

Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times: elegant but dispiriting.

Mike Clark in USA Today: visuals save the day.

Tim Lammers on WNBC.com: mind-blowing visual effects, but story lags.

David Germain in the Associated Press: "possibly the worst sequel to a really good film ever made."

Paul Clinton on CNN.com: visually stunning, but empty.

yupi msn (en espaÒol): Obsesionados por rÈcord de taquilla lanzan "The Matrix Reloaded"

Microsoft's iLoo goes down the tubes

Mike Cassidy in today's San Jose Merc: For two glorious weeks we had the iLoo. Talk about the high-water mark of the Digital Age. Microsoft's Internet-enabled outhouse promised to take us where no man or woman had gone before. But now the dream of the wired toilet is over.

On racy postmodern literature

Susannah Breslin, aka The Reverse Cowgirl, asks: Would you like to become an important part of the exciting future of racy postmodern literature? I bet you would. I know I would.

Today is the kickoff of The You're A Bad Man, Aren't You? Fundraiser. You can read more below.

The Reverse Cowgirl tells more:

Future Tense Books is a wonderful, one-man publishing house in Portland, Oregon, helmed by the unstoppable one-man publishing crew of Kevin Sampsell.

This summer, FTB is publishing a collection of my short stories. The title is You're A Bad Man, Aren't You? The contents feature a baker's dozen worth of my tawdry tales.

What does this have to do with you? Future Tense Books is very great, but it is also very small. To make a nice looking book, The Reverse Cowgirl's Blog is attempting to raise $1,200 for it by the end of this month.

Future Tense Books will be using this money to work with the insanely talented Pete McCracken at Crack Press to print a fiction collection worth of your fondling.

You can read more on The Reverse Cowgirl's Blog here.

Super-DMCA legislation in Tenn.

Tennessee journalist and blogger Bill Hobbs has the latest on the Super-DMCA legislation introduced in Tennessee, which would outlaw any device hooked up to your cable TV network unless it's approved by the cable company. Like a TiVo. Like a DVR. Like a VCR, fer gosh sake.

This is madness.

The president's long, strange day on 9/11

Here's the most comprehensive account I've seen of the timeline of President Bush's movements and actions on 9/11, pieced together from media accounts and public records by the Center for Cooperative Research, an apparent advocacy group -- which doesn't discount its reportage.

Here's journalist Ryan Pitts' take on this.

Q&A with Neil Budde

@newyork.com has a Q&A with Neil Budde, former publisher of WSJ.com. An excerpt of Budde on the blogging phenomenon:

If you look at what people said about Blogs, it sounds like what they said about the Web sites in general a few years back. They are going to disintermediate the media, put the power in the hands of everybody, that big media names won't matter that much anymore. The difference between saying that then and now, is that it's a lot easier to be the publisher everyone said they would be.

But I don't know if blogs have fundamentally changed the dynamics of the media business. There are great tools available that have taken personal Web pages into a new area, but it's not exactly a new phenomenon. It's just that some people are doing it quite well, and becoming experts at looking at what's going on in the world. What's amusing to me, is that most of the Weblogs I use are for business purposes. I end up signing up for their e-mail as well, so now I'm reading an e-mail newsletter instead of a blog.

I think the blogging movement is important and interesting. But I also think it's not necessarily going to change the world the way we think. In some ways, it's actually going back to the traditional notion of using an intermediary who's helping you sort out what you need to know without being overwhelmed with what's on the Web.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Celebs beware: 'Smoking Gun' coming to TV

Reuters: The Smoking Gun, a Web site devoted to digging up court documents in the skeletons of celebrity closets, is coming to television in August with a new show debuting on the Court TV cable.

Hillary vs. Bill

The NY Post reports that CBS is skittish about a possible 60 Minutes interview with Hillary Clinton about her new book because Bill Clinton is under contract to appear on the show.

Here's an idea: 60 Minutes should dump the cadaverous and intellectually vacuous GOP apologist Bill Dole and launch a new slugfest: Hillary vs. Bill. Now, that would be television worth watching.

A survey of bloggers and blog readers

Those who regularly read weblogs are invited to participate in a 15-minute online survey by clicking through a series of questions. It's legit -- researchers at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale are behind it.

Thinking global, Google News goes local

Internet.com:

Looking to serve more of a global audience, Google said it is adding more regional categories to its news service.

The Mountain View, Calif. based search engine company unveiled five new country-specific global news service sites that are based on its main Google News offering.

"Today we have Google Canada, U.K., New Zealand, Australia, and India," said Krishna Bharat, principal scientist with Google. "It is all part of our plan to be an unbiased global news provider that also serves local tastes."

EPpy winners announced

The 2003 EPpy Awards were presented Friday in San Diego at the Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show sponsored by Editor & Publisher and Mediaweek magazines, honoring the best in online journalism. Among the winners: NYTimes.com, DallasNews.com, LJWorld.com, Lawrence.com, USAToday.com and ESPN.com.

The NY Times' Blair Watch Project

Today in Editor & Publisher: The Blair Watch Project. 14 Unanswered Questions in the NY Times' Jayson Blair Probe.

The Times' clueless jab at new media

Steve Lohr in the Week in Review section of the Sunday NY Times: 'NewMedia': Ready for the Dustbin of History? Excerpt:

Mr. Diller and others have come to realize that two things succeed commercially on the World Wide Web: searching (like Google and Yahoo) and shopping (like Amazon.com and eBay).

Is that what the digital revolution has come to? Back in the mid-1990's, it was going to cause a media revolution. The shift to bits, the 1's and 0's of computer code, would change everything, wrote Nicholas Negroponte, director of the M. I. T. Media Laboratory, in his 1995 best seller, "Being Digital." Book publishers, newspapers, magazines, television networks and movie studios ó all would be digitized, some would disappear, but vast new opportunities would arise.

The shift to bits promised more than just faster and cheaper distribution of the same old information and entertainment. The digital age held out the potential for a genuinely "new media." Pundits and media executives spoke about the prospect of everything from interactive television and shopping ó click the zapper to suggest a new story line or buy the sweater Jennifer Aniston was wearing on that "Friends" episode ó to donning goggles and suits to enter virtual worlds offering simulated sports, travel and sex.

But it hasn't happened. The companies that spent hugely on the "digital convergence" of media and Internet-era computing, AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal, which bought Mr. Diller's media properties, are in turmoil. And their visionary architects, Stephen M. Case at AOL Time Warner and Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi Universal, have been ousted.

"In the early days, in the 1990's, we thought that media was the big application on the Web," said Michael Kinsley, who founded the online magazine Slate in 1996. "But it turned out to be e-commerce."

This is the most cock-eyed, clueless article I've read in the New York Times in some times, reeking of old media hubris. Michael Kinsley, despite years at the helm of Slate, still doesn't know what the online revolution has been all about. E-commerce? What imaginary island is he living on?

More nonsense from Kinsley:

Mr. Kinsley, who retired as editor in chief last year, concedes that Slate, while a widely respected magazine, has not yet developed into a distinctively new medium. "The multimedia component is our biggest failure, but it is a failure we share with everyone else," he said.

Actually, not true again. Slate has been notable online mostly for its refusal to veer from its roots in the elitist East Coast media establishment. If Slate has failed to embrace the ethos and sensibilities of the Web, it's not the Web's fault.

More nonsense from the article:

It's now obvious nobody yet knows how to create a successful, and truly new, medium.

It's true that the yelping of pundits who predicted that the digital revolutioin would doom the book publishing business or create fundamental changes in the movie or publishing industries overnight was off-base from the start, and if Lohr had confined his thesis to that subject, he might have been on target.

Instead, he points to large media conglomerates like AOL Time Warner and Vivendi -- and their failure to unlock the commercial treasures of the online space -- as evidence that "new media" has been a bust. As for Microsoft's failure in the media space proving that there's no future in new media, one can only laugh at the speciousness of the claim. (As a former editor with Microsoft, I know a little bit about the subject.) Microsoft's efforts proved only that a software company isn't cut out to be a player in the media space.

But the most obvious shortcomings of the article have to do with its jaw-dropping leaps in logic. How in God's name can Lohr and the Times overlook such basic truths as the following?:

- In the commercial space, the Times' web site attracts over 10 million unique visitors a month -- ten times its print numbers. The Times' new media division is raking in millions of dollars in profits each quarter. Microsoft's MSNBC.com and CNN.com have recently been attracting 5 million and 4 million users per day.

- Dozens of other online media companies are now turning a profit in the worst advertising downturn in history.

- Tens of millions of people get their news and large doses of their daily information from online sources. Young people, especially, are leaving old media in droves for, yep, new media.

- Apart from commercial enterprises, more than half a million weblogs have taken off and are increasingly becoming a staple of countless readers' daily routines. Yes, weblogs are new media.

The Times should be ashamed for publishing such a simple-minded tunnel vision view of the new media landscape. Of course, the Times won't let you email Lohr to offer your view.

Extraordinary inquiry into plagiarism at Times

Here's the extraordinary and detailed report by members of the New York Times editorial staff on the case of the plagiarizing reporter who resigned from the paper last week:

Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception. Excerpt from the 10-page article:

A staff reporter for The New York Times committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months, an investigation by Times journalists has found. The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.

The reporter, Jayson Blair, 27, misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when often he was far away, in New York. He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not.

And he used these techniques to write falsely about emotionally charged moments in recent history, from the deadly sniper attacks in suburban Washington to the anguish of families grieving for loved ones killed in Iraq.

In an inquiry focused on correcting the record and explaining how such fraud could have been sustained within the ranks of The Times, the Times journalists have so far uncovered new problems in at least 36 of the 73 articles Mr. Blair wrote since he started getting national reporting assignments late last October. In the final months the audacity of the deceptions grew by the week, suggesting the work of a troubled young man veering toward professional self-destruction.

Mr. Blair, who has resigned from the paper, was a reporter at The Times for nearly four years, and he was prolific. Spot checks of the more than 600 articles he wrote before October have found other apparent fabrications, and that inquiry continues. The Times is asking readers to report any additional falsehoods in Mr. Blair's work; the e-mail address is retrace@nytimes.com.

Also, an 8-page sidebar, Witnesses and Documents Unveil Deceptions in a Reporter's Work. And a short Editor's Note.

All in all, a remarkable effort by the Times to restore its reputation for trust -- and another example of how fragile that trust can be broken in a 1,100-member newsroom, by a single person.

WSJ.com pings the news

CNET News.com: The online leg of The Wall Street Journal on Thursday began offering stock quotes and snippets of its news stories to users of AOL Instant Messenger, in an attempt to attract new subscribers to its site.

Log on and enter the Matrix

Australian IT: With the push of a button, the computer game Enter The Matrix was launched in Sydney Wednesday night, marking the final marketing frenzy for one of this year's most anticipated films.

The game is the first of its kind to be completely integrated with a film. It was written by Matrix creators Andy and Larry Wachowski, features the film's stars and was made in Sydney while The Matrix Reloaded and the final movie in the series, The Matrix Revolutions, were being filmed.

Webcast of tennis in the buff

Hollywood Reporter via CNN.com: Naked tennis, anyone? A Florida nudist colony is planning what it's calling the first-ever webcast of a nude tennis tournament. For a fee of $10-$13, Internet surfers can go to http://www.TennisInTheBuff.com and watch on demand the two-hour tournament after it's played Sunday.

Ah, progress.

'P2P whipping boy' speaks

In Wired News, Katie Dean interviews Joe Nievelt, who agreed to pay $15,000 after tje RIAA sued him for running a "Napster-like" network on campus. But the Michigan Tech junior says he doubts his high-profile case will have much impact on file trading.

Sheila's interview with Salam Pax

From Sheila's blog on Projo.com:

Now that he's apparently safe, I feel free to publish a snippet of an email exchange I had with "Salam Pax," the blogger who seems to be in Baghdad, back in February.

Webber's injury changes everything

I just heard on ESPN that Chris Webber tore cartilage in his knee last night and will miss the rest of the playoffs. Sometimes it's just brutally unfair how thngs go in professional sports. The Kings have had the best team in the NBA the past two years. They should have won the title last year, were it not for (a) the appalling display of officiating in Game 6 of the western finals, a stink-it-up performance that raised suspicion of a fix and calls for an inquiry by no less than Ralph Nader; (b) their untimely display of poor free throwing shooting in Game 7; (c) the freak tip that led to Robert Horry's game-winning 3-pointer in last year's Game 4. Quite a series.

NBA fans were looking for a rematch of perhaps the best rivalry in professional sports. Now that Webber is out, and Bobby Jackson has a fractured cheekbone (though he's able to play), it's hard to think that the Kings can pull off the unprecedented -- winning an NBA player without their star player. Imagine the Lakers without Kobe or Shaq (not hard to imagine ... they wouldn't even make the playoffs). Or the Spurs without Duncan, or the Mavs without Nowitzky.

Shit. The fans of Sacramento deserve that title.

Plagiarism uncovered at the NY Times

PBS' NewsHour with Jim Lehrer carried a report today by Terence Smith on New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, who resigned last week after admitting he plagiarized parts of an article about the family of an American soldier in Iraq. As more charges of Blair's alleged plagiarism and fraudulent reporting emerged, the New York Times decided to assign five reporters and three editors to re-check four years of Blair's work. The Times plans to publish the results of its investigation on Sunday and will ask readers to notify editors of additional errors.

The extent to which the reporter's plagiarism went unnoticed raises a host of unsettling questions concerning journalistic ethics and professionalism. Smith explores those questions with NYT Executive Editor Howell Raines in today's segment. I listened to part of it in the car, and will watch the entire episode later tonight. Sad affair.

The report was supposed to go up on the NewsHour's Media Watch page two hours ago, but hasn't yet appeared. But there's a RealAudio clip of the segment on the NewsHour's front page.

In Slate, meanwhile, Jack Shafer has this: The Jayson Blair Project.
How did he bamboozle the New York Times?

Should blogs be removed from Google?

Register UK: Google to fix blog noise problem, writes blog-hater Andrew Orlowski. And kpaul wonders, how are they going to define blog?

The posters on Webmaster World think it's a good idea for Google to remove blogs from its main search engine. I think it's a terrible idea. Why should weblogs be ghettoized? They offer some of the most valuable content on the Web. One hopes Google will steer a middle course, finding a way to remove some of the noise and the irrelevant chaff while retaining the kernels of useful information.

Doc chimes in.

A Sponsored Archive from the NYT

Another go-around on the subject of sponsored content is likely after The New York Times today published on its front page a "Sponsored Archive" of the new Fox Searchlight movie The Dancer Upstairs. The word "Advertisement" appears directly above the banner ad whisking users to the special section.

This one is a bit strange. The Sponsored Archive page says:

The reporting of these articles from The New York Times was paid for by Fox Searchlight Pictures. The editorial staff of The New York Times was not involved in the selection of these articles or the production of this archive.

And when you click through a link to an interior page ñ which are set off by a different color and type treatment than the rest of the Times -- a notice in the right nav announces:

This archive republishes a comprehensive selection of New York Times articles about the career of John Malkovich, the director of "The Dancer Upstairs," including reviews of his films and stage appearances, as well as interviews. Also included are Times articles about Javier Bardem, the star of "The Dancer Upstairs," as well as a review of the novel by Nicholas Shakespeare upon which it is based.

"The Dancer Upstairs" is now playing in select cities.

Regular readers with long memories may recall the NY Times' launch of The Tolkien Archives -- apparently, its first stab at sponsored content drawing upon its editorial archives -- back in December 2001. After that experiment, CBS MarketWatch dinged the Times for blurring the lines between editorial and advertising. (The Times received on the order of $1 million or more for the Tolkien Archives, and it's likely this compact is in the same price range.) (And incidentally, I can't tell if the CBS MarketWatch link is still active; I registered once on the site, it forgot about me, and now it's asking me to re-register -- no thanks.) The Wall Street Journal also raised an eyebrow at the practice in an AP story headlined, "Online Publishers Struggle to Decide Where to Draw Line on Advertising. Ads Copying Sites' Design Overstep Traditional Newspaper Limits."

I defended the Times last time around (on my blog and on the online-news list) because the Times was merely republishing editorial material it had already published years ago, so there was no possibility of advertiser influence upon the editorial content. It also disclosed the practice, although it needed to be typographically set off in a more distinct way.

This effort by the Times is different, because it doesn't draw from decades-old material, but from as recently as two weeks ago. If you're keeping score at home, we have:

• 2 articles from 2003 (indeed, from the past two months);

• 1 article from 2001;

• 2 from 2000;

• 1 from 1997;

• 1 from 1994;

• 1 from 1993;

• 1 from 1987;

• 1 from 1985;

• 3 from 1984;

• 2 from 1982.

This is a bit more problematic and disconcerting, in my view, as the Times continues to tippy-toe closer to the ethical edge. The possibility of advertiser influence upon the editorial content is now very real in this case. Wouldn't it cross a movie reviewer's mind that a negative review of a major motion picture could cost his or her employer more than a million dollars in advertising? I suppose these types of considerations occur every day, but a motion picture studio yanking a $50,000 ad from the Timesí Arts & Leisure section because they donít like the paperís review is a bit different than the prospective loss of more than $1 million.

I don't agree with those who believe that all sponsored sections compromise a news organization's credibility and ethical standards. I think we need to draw lines, and for me, the placement of a movie review in a major advertising product only two weeks after its appearance in the paper seems to cross that line, even if the Timesí editorial department had no role in the archive. At the very least, it gives me great pause.

Boston Globe reporter killed in Iraq

Boston Globe: Elizabeth Neuffer, an award-winning reporter for The Boston Globe, was killed today in an automobile accident in Iraq while on assignment there covering the aftermath of the war.

By the way, incidental point, but this is the first time I can remember ever seeing a link from the front page of the New York Times (above the fold, anyway) to a story in a sister publication.

The public domain

Duke Law School's November 2001 conference on the public domain has produced some thoughtful papers.

Journalist may sue to get his blog back

New in OJR: Mark Glaser asks, Will Denis Horgan Blog Again? Glaser reports that the Hartford Courant's travel editor is pursuing legal remedies to get his personal weblog back. Writes Glaser:

Now, the longtime columnist is talking to a lawyer about legal action, and hopes that the threat of a lawsuit will get the paper to back off and allow him to blog again. "I think I'm going to win this," he told me. "Hopefully cooler heads will prevail, and the law will prevail. I have no demands. I want no apologies. I just want to be left alone, so I can come into my family room and type away at my keyboard every night." ...

The 61-year-old veteran journalist had his son set up the weblog for him, and is now a serious believer in the technology. He sees an inevitability in the power of journalist weblogs. "This wave of technology is irresistable for professional journalists," he says. "And when newspaper people really start doing it, watch out. Their efforts will dwarf the various weblogs started for other reasons."

As for the big reaction in journalism circles to the blog's demise, Horgan could see that one coming. "There's a big irony factor in a newspaper that defends the rights of the Ku Klux Klan to speak their vile thoughts, and then turning on one of their own. I knew it would resonate." But the global reaction was more of a surprise, and Horgan has received emails from Brazil, Sweden, France, Spain and Ireland.

As I've written before, I think the Courant overstepped its bounds in muzzling the personal writings of an editorial staffer, and I hope they reconsider their decision.

Bush, Blair nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Bad joke of the day. Unfortunately, it's true:

Reuters via Yahoo: Blair and Bush nominated for Nobel Peace Prize.

Where are they, Mr. President?

A column on the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction by noted lefty Patrick J. Buchanan.

Japan's little online daily

New in Japan Media Review, the sister publication of the Online Journalism Review:

JanJan: Japan's Little Online Daily with Big Dreams
Frustrated with the complacent reporting offered up by Japan's daily papers, journalist and former mayor Ken Takeuchi launched Japan's first serious alternative online daily. He hopes to follow in the footsteps of OhmyNews, Korea's wildly successful online publication.

It's all free!

New in the current Time mag: It's all free! Music! Movies! TV shows! Millions of people download them every day. Is digital piracy killing the entertainment industry?

The long arm of Longhorn

In other Microsoft news today, Wired News looks at the OS successor to Windows XP:

Content producers probably will love it -- digital rights management will be built right in. Hardware developers remain unsure: The OS boasts tons of spiffy new entertainment features that could encourage consumers to upgrade, but will users be spooked by all that rights management stuff?

DVD Release Tests Format by Microsoft

From Circuits in today's NYT:

Yet another video release of "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (1991) would not seem notable, even on DVD. But for Microsoft, the new version amounts to the first test of a concept.

The two-disc set, to be released in June by Artisan Home Entertainment as "T2: Extreme DVD," will have a list price of $29.98. One disc will include a digitally remastered high-definition version of the film, with enhanced 5.1-channel surround sound, using a new Microsoft format called Windows Media 9. It promises almost three and a half times the resolution of a traditional DVD.

But there is a catch: it will play only on a computer using Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. And to appreciate the effects, users will have to download the free Windows Media 9 player software.

Resizing my blog's text size

For the past couple of years I've been aiming my slingshot at weblogs and websites that use a fixed pixel size, rather than a relative size, for its main body text. Two days ago I posted a slight jab at ReadMe and Poynter.org for their failings on this score. (I'm not alone; it's also a personal beef of the wise web usability expert Jakob Nielsen.)

Steve Bryant, managing editor of ReadMe, generously says they'll be going back to their web developer to address the issue.

And Kynn Bartlett posts a comment below that says MovableType's templates should be changed so that main body type is set to medium rather than small.

I just took up Kynn's suggestion and changed my Cascading Style Sheet so that it's now set to medium for this body type. I suspect it's a bit more readable on some machines, but let me know your view (or post it here).

Kynn also suggested that I publish my templates. I don't see why not, so I'll do so below. One question to you coding wizards out there: My blog is coming out pretty screwy on the Safari browser, which I suspect is due to the following formatting, which was not a part of the MT default template, but was suggested by a MT power user:

#content
width: 520px;
w\idth: 65%;

#links
width:200px;
w\idth: 25%;

In IE and Netscape, it looks fine, but in Safari, the calendar and blogroll overlap the main box in the middle of the blog by an inch or so, and other times they appear about 20 inches down the page at the bottom right.

Any suggestions on how to fix it?

Here are my CSS and main index templates: [Later: I had to remove this coding because it was messing up my archive template.]

High school confidential, online

Here's a NY Times story abouit students flocking to Web-based bulletin boards where they can read comments about peers or teachers, then add or respond anonymously to what they see. Sites include BeniciaNews.com, RateMyTeachers.com and SchoolScandals.com (the LA Times carried a story about the latter a few weeks ago).

Should news outfits rein in their staffers?

Here's a commentary in the Boston Globe about the flap over sportswriter Bob Ryan's suspension. Some interesting issues to consider regarding how far news organizations should go in allowing or prohibiting their staffers from appearing in other media.

Thanks to Hylton for the pointer.

Free wi-fi access spreads

Katie Hafner in the NY Times: Internet Access for the Cost of a Cup of Coffee.

The latest on electronic newspapers

Ryan Pitts in the Dead Parrot Society blog:

The newspaper industry has been looking forward to this for a long time: A company called E Ink has developed a microthin, flexible screen that dynamically displays information when charged through a static hookup. The display remains clear at almost any angle, resolution is better than that of a computer monitor, and the screen retains image quality even when rolled up. Wireless capability is on the way, and improvements in speed may allow the screens to show video. ...

I think we're still about five years away from seeing this roll out as a commercial product in a major way, but when it does it's going to be very, very cool.

A modest oral history project

NY Times: Oral History Project Wants Nation of Interviewers.

Prospects for new media

Pointers from IWantMedia:

Journalism.co.uk: Rosy Future for Online Journalism. The future for Web journalism is brightening up, with several studies revealing an upswing in Internet usage and revenues for several media companies' online outlets.

USA Today: Can TiVo survive cable's attack?

The future of online advertising

Jimmy Gutermanís take on the (annoying) future of online advertising, in Business 2.0.

Here's a suggestion for advertisers: Be useful. Offer value. Don't get in my face.

Boston Globe columnist suspended

Ryan Pitts in his Dead Parrot Society blog has the lowdown on suspended Boston Globe sports columnist Bob Ryan for making a remark on TV that he never would have made in the paper. Hey Bob, what you say on TV isn't the same as what you can say in a bar with your drinking buddies. Y'know?

Meantime, I wish news organizations would apply the same standards of decency to smack-down talking head shout-fests like The O'Reilly Factor.

Converging newspaper and TV news operations

LA Times story on media consolidation and convergence: Journalism's Future May Start in Tampa. A couple of excepts:

... Said newspaper analyst John Morton: "The idea of TV and newspapers collaborating is still a recent phenomenon. We don't know how it will work." ...

"Convergence may be good for media companies, but it's bad for journalism," said Robert Haiman, president emeritus of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, who has been a Tampa Tribune consultant and was once executive editor of the rival St. Petersburg Times.

Without the cross-ownership ban, experts worry that newspapers would fall under the influence of large TV station groups or media conglomerates, such as AOL Time Warner Inc., Viacom Inc. or News Corp., which might emphasize entertainment and profit over journalism and community service.

Dear Raed is back

Salam Pax, aka Dear Raed, is back on the blog beat. He's emailing his entries to fellow blogger Diana Moon, who's publishing his postings from Baghdad. Thanks to Samara of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer for the tip. Excerpt:

Let me tell you one thing first. War sucks big time. Donít let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you donít think about your ìimminent liberationî anymore.

But I am sounding now like the Taxi drivers I have fights with whenever I get into one. ...

When we were watching the Saddam statue being pulled down, one of my aunts was saying that she never thought she would see this day during her lifetime. ...

War. No matter what the outcome is. These things leave a trail of destruction behind them. There were days when the Red Crescent was begging for volunteers to help in taking the bodies of dead people off the city street and bury them properly. The hospital grounds have been turned to burial grounds when the electricity went out and there was no way the bodies can be kept until someone comes and identifies. ...

Things are looking kind of OK, these days. Life has a way of moving on. Your senses are numbed, things stop shocking you. If there is one thing you should believe in, it is that life will find a way to push on, humans are adaptable, that is the only way to explain how such a foolish species has kept itself on this planet without wiping itself out. Humans are very adaptable, physically and emotionally.

Fascinating glimpse at the effects of war's aftermath on everyday life in Iraq.

How to think about spam

Declan's latest in News.com: "Spam is not primarily a technological or legal problem: It's an economic one." The solution? Begin charging 'em.

Gates takes a page from Steve Jobs

Wired News: Bill Gates gives the opening keynote at the 12th annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, talking about the importance of designing visually appealing, easy-to-use PCs and software. Best line:

"Whoa, did I get on the wrong plane and end up at MacWorld?" wondered hardware developer Frank Copper. "Since when does Microsoft care about how computers or software looks? Someone has obviously hacked and reprogrammed Bill."

Solution to Enter Network Password problem

Behold, I hold the answer to a question that hundreds of webloggers have asked me about since I first wrote about it more than a year ago: the dreaded Enter Network Password glitch in Outlook and Outlook Express.

From the moment I purchased a new Dell PC with Windows XP 16 months ago, Outlook 2002 began pestering me with a dialogue box every five minutes. I wrote about it last spring, last summer and again in February.

Michael Tenenbaum of Harvard was one of the hundreds of folks who spotted one of my postings. He did a little further digging and turned up a March 11, 2003, document in the Microsoft Knowledge Base that solved the problem. I had come across a half-dozen other Microsoft documents that did not do the trick, and this one seemed to apply only to Outlook Express, not Outlook 2002, so I was skeptical. But I followed the arcane steps it outlined, and lo and behold, it worked. I no longer have to manually send and receive, and when I set Outlook to automatically send and fetch email every 10 minutes, it now does so without asking for that infernal password. (I'm the only one on my home network, so Outlook's request for a password a few thousand times over the past year was a bit maddening.) The problem, apparently was a "corrupted" registry key, even though the password worked when manually entered.

Michael, I and countless other bloggers owe you a big debt of gratitude.

In case the Microsoft article becomes lost in the ether, I'll reproduce the steps below.

SYMPTOMS
When you run Outlook Express using Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows XP and connect to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to retrieve e-mail messages from a Post Office Protocol (POP) server, your password is not retained even though you have chosen to save it.

CAUSE
The registry contains incorrect information for the Protected Storage System Provider registry subkey for your account.

RESOLUTION
To save your password you must back up your registry, remove the user account information, and then re-enter your password. Only people who are members of the Administrators group on the local computer can make these changes. Windows XP Home Edition users need to check the Users control panel. If they are not listed as an Administrator, someone with Administrator rights will have to add them to the Administrators group.

WARNING: If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

How to Back up the Registry

Windows 2000

Click Start, click Run, type regedt32 in the Open box, and then click OK.
Locate and click the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Protected Storage System Provider

On the Registry menu, click Save Key.
In the File name box, type a unique name for the key.
In the Save In box, click a location for the file, and then click Save.
On the Registry menu, click Exit.

Windows XP

Click Start, click Run, type regedt32 in the Open box, and then click OK.
Locate and click the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Protected Storage System Provider

On the File menu, click Export.
In the File name box, type a unique name for the key.
In the Save In box, click a location for the file, and then click Save.
On the Registry menu, click Exit.

How to Remove the User Account Information

Windows 2000

Quit all programs.
Click Start, click Run, type regedt32 in the Open box, and then click OK.
Locate and click the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Protected Storage System Provider

On the Security menu, click Permissions.
Click the registry key for the user that is currently logged on and ensure that Read and Full Control are both set to Allow.
Click the Advanced button, ensure that user that is currently logged on is selected, that Full Control is listed in the Permissions column, and that This Key and Subkeys is listed in the Apply to column.
Click to select the Reset permissions on all child objects and enable propagation of inheritable permissions check box.
Click Apply, and then click Yes when you are prompted to continue.
Click OK, and then click OK.
Double-click the Protected Storage System Provider key to expand the key, click the user subkey folder that is directly below the Protected Storage System Provider key, click Delete on the Edit menu, and then click Yes in the warning message dialog box.

The user subkey folder looks similar to the following example:
S-1-5-21-124525095-708259637-1543119021-16701

NOTE: For every identity that you have, there will be a subkey under the Protected Storage System Provider key. To resolve this problem in all of your identities, you must delete all of the user subkeys folders under the Protected Storage System Provider key.
On the Registry menu, click Exit, and then restart your computer.

Windows XP

Quit all programs.
Click Start, click Run, type regedt32 in the Open box, and then click OK.
Locate and click the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Protected Storage System Provider

On the Edit menu, click Permissions.
Click the registry key for the user that is currently logged on and ensure that Read and Full Control permissions are both set to Allow.
Click the Advanced button, ensure that the user that is currently logged on is selected, that Full Control is listed in the Permissions column, and that This Key and Subkeys is listed in the Apply to column.
Click to select the Replace permission entries on all child objects with entries shown here that apply to child objects check box.
Click Apply, and then click Yes when you receive a prompt to continue.
Click OK, and then click OK again.
Double-click the Protected Storage System Provider key to expand the key, click the user subkey folder that is directly below the Protected Storage System Provider key, click Delete on the Edit menu, and then click Yes in the warning message dialog box.

The user subkey folder looks similar to the following example:
S-1-5-21-124525095-708259637-1543119021-16701

NOTE: For every identity that you have, there may be a subkey under the Protected Storage System Provider key. To resolve this issue in all of your identities, you must delete all of the user subkeys folders under the Protected Storage System Provider key.
On the Registry menu, click Exit, and then restart your computer.
How to Re-Enter Your Password

NOTE: These steps work for both Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Start Outlook Express.

NOTE: If you receive a login error, close the dialog box and proceed.
Click Tools, and then click Accounts.
Click the Mail tab in the Internet Accounts window.
In the Account column, click to highlight the Internet E-mail account to be changed, and then click Properties.
On the Server tab, type your password in the Password box, and then click to select Remember password dialog box.
Click OK, and then click Close.
Close Outlook Express and then restart it.
On the Tools menu, click Send and Receive to test if your password is retained.

NOTE: If other Windows 2000 or Windows XP users are having password retention problems, re-enter the password, and then click to select the Remember Password check box for those profiles. Each user may need to log on for their password to be retained.

McCarthy hearings online

The McCarthy hearings -- the 1954-54 Communist witch hunt conducted by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations -- are now online. Here's today's NY Times story on this: Transcripts Detail Secret Questioning in 50's by McCarthy.

DJs suspended for playing Dixie Chicks

Associated Press story in Washington Post: Country station KKCS has suspended two disc jockeys for playing the Dixie Chicks, violating a ban imposed after the group criticized President Bush.

"They [the DJs] made it very clear that they support wholeheartedly the president of the United States. They support wholeheartedly the troops, the military. But they also support the right of free speech," the station manager said.

Moblogs: roving personal media outlets

Speaking of ReadMe, a while back Lisa Le Fevre interviewed me on the subject of moblogging. Turns out her piece appeared in ReadMe a couple of weeks back: The Three M's of Moblogs: Mobile Phone Blogging, Real-time Mobility and Mob Media. Whether they serve as personal travellogs, political weapons or media outlets on the go, moblogs take the amateur journalism of weblogs into the field. Excerpt from the article:

Today, moblogging is much more than an urban legend. Involving only a laptop and a wireless card, mobile blogging offers the potential for hybrid forms of media that can be accessed anywhere, anytime. Now, multimedia news can travel faster as users call up information and text images from the street using personal cell phones. What results, is a three-way conference call between wireless technology, real-time mobility, and mobdriven media.

Howard Rheingold is quoted in the article as well. Here's the full Q&A I did with Lisa on the subject of moblogging:

How does mobile access to weblogs affect the writers and the readers?

I suspect we're talking about a niche of a niche. That may not be sexy, but the fact remains that perhaps only 1 or 2 percent of the half million bloggers out there will be using mobile access to update their weblogs. A lot of the professional blogging class already have a laptop, PDA or (soon) a tablet PC to update their blogs when they're on the go.

Most bloggers with mobile phones will use them to communicate with other bloggers or confidants before they post an entry. At the new media conference at UC Berkeley on Saturday, someone sent a text message to a member of the audience, who relayed the question to one of the panels. That's power.

If weblogging could be called a genre similar to diary or journal musings, what happens to it now that people can log on their blog while on the go?

In a few years, when mobile phones with text messaging or keyboard access begin to take off in a serious way, I think we'll see more people jump into the amateur journalism game. The temptation to report, or chronicle, a public event as it's happening will be enormous. It will become second nature for young people to get on their mobiles and tell the world what they're experiencing.

This will really be something when built-in cameras and camcorders become pervasive, so that bloggers can broadcast visuals in real time. Text is cool, but pictures bring immediacy and a richness of detail as no words can.

Lastly, what is your personal opinion? Whould prefer to check on your blog from outside, or wait till you get home? And, which do you think will be used in the future?

Mobile phones will bring convenience and immediacy to the weblog experience. But I think good old desktops will remain the technology of choice for some years to come.

I think moblogging -- where bloggers post photos and impressions from the field -- will grow in importance in the coming years, although I doubt it will ever reach critical mass. The reason? A mobile phone will always be primarly a communication tool rather than a publishing device.

Finally: If you have time, you should contact Joi Ito, who has written extensively about moblogging.

ReadMe on the spam flap

ReadMe. the webzine produced by students in the Department of Journalism at New York University, is looking pretty good these days. The new issue (it publishes sporadically) features a Q&A with journalist Declan McCullagh, who doesn't much care for Larry Lessig's solution to the spam epidemic.

By the way, what do ReadMe and Poynter.org have in common? An awful reader-be-damned design sensibility that imposes a fixed-size cascading style sheet format that disables the text-size button on a user's browser. (ReadMe is, ironically, harder to read.)

It's because of these kinds of design decisions that I'm, alas, returning to my own stylesheet, a trick that overrides publications' font defaults, letting me read web pages at a comfortable size. It throws the look of some web pages off, but until web publishers figure out that their readers come first, I don't see an alternative.

A new personalized newspaper

The Miami Herald has launched a personalized, customizable online newspaper, MyHerald.com. Sree Sreenivasan of Columbia University has the lowdown on Poynter.org.

If I lived in Florida, I suspect I'd be a regular user of the site. I wrote about personalized news publications a while back here and here.

Wal-mart bans 'racy' men's mags

NY Times: Wal-mart has banned three "racy" men's magazines -- Maxim, Stuff and FHM -- after customer complaints.

But Guns & Ammo stays.

Dan Bricklin featured in NYT

Steve Lohr of the NY Times has a feature today on Dan Bricklin, the tech pioneer and blogger: A Once and Present Innovator, Still Pushing Buttons. Excerpt:

These days, Mr. Bricklin is tinkering with new gadgetry. He carries a pocket-size digital camera, the latest cellphone equipped with organizer software and a tiny keyboard and a new notebook personal computer with a screen that can be used as a tablet for writing notes with a stylus.

But his real interest lies in trying to bridge the gap between geeky technology and ordinary people.

"My focus has been mainly on the regular user," Mr. Bricklin said. "The challenge is to make it easy to use tools."

Here's something Bricklin recently wrote on SATN.org: Online piracy is not like shoplifting.

Jeffords on the budget mess

For those interested in helping bring back some fiscal sanity to the budget debate in Washington, MoveOn.org has an online petition, Save Our Schools from Budget Disaster.

Meantime, the principled independent senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, delivered the weekly Democratic radio address on May 3, summarizing the current situation regarding the deficit, budget and more tax cuts for the rich:

Hello, this is Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont.

Two years ago this month I made my decision to leave the Republican Party and become an Independent. One reason I made that change was that I felt the Republican Party that I knew, and grew up with, had changed its priorities dramatically. Those changed priorities were best exemplified by President Bush's insistence on a budget that short-changed so many of our national needs: education and special education; health care and prescription drugs for our elderly, environmental protection; and, importantly, deficit reduction.

It is now two years later, and it seems that we're having the same debate again. The President is again proposing a budget that does not adequately fund America's needs and includes new tax breaks that are likely to force disastrous cuts in urgent national programs, and create horrendous future deficits. And again, those who are expressing their reservations are being vilified for taking stands of conscience. This happened in 2001 when I made my decision to leave the Republican party, and it is sad for me to watch it happen again. When did standing on principle, speaking your conscience and representing your constituents become unacceptable in certain Republican circles?

When he was pushing for the first tax cut, President Bush said that we could do it all, we could afford a tax cut, make investments in our national priorities, and still have money left over to pay down the debt. Time has proven those words wrong, and we have massive job losses and a soaring deficit to show for it. After the President's proposal was reduced, I supported the 2001 tax cut. That was a mistake, one I will not make again.

Now, those needs I spoke of two years ago have become even more pressing, and we face the new challenges of protecting America and fighting a war against terror. President Bush has said that his plan is a, "jobs growth package." But the only thing guaranteed to grow is the federal budget deficit, something Republicans used to care about, and I still do. We will be paying for these tax cuts with borrowed funds, money borrowed from our children and grandchildren who will be forced to foot the bill. And these deficits will explode just as the baby boom generation begins to retire, further endangering the health of Social Security and Medicare, both of which are so critically important to our seniors.

Perhaps more importantly, the President's plan doesn't benefit the people who need it most. In my home state of Vermont, 2,200 people have lost their jobs. Many who are lucky enough to have jobs are just barely scraping by. What will this plan do for them? Well, two-thirds of Vermont taxpayers will get a tax cut of less than $100. Yet, someone who makes a million dollars a year will get a tax cut of $90,000.

This fervor for tax breaks at the expense of all else demonstrates that there are some who see tax cuts not as a policy, but as a theology. Their belief that tax cuts will solve any problem is uncompromising, unyielding, and, sadly, undeterred by past experience. Our goal should not be a tax cut for the sake of a tax cut, especially one that gives most of its benefits to a very few people. Our goal should be a policy that puts Americans back to work, gets our economy growing and keeps us on the right track for future generations.

What should we do to boost our ailing economy and help those Americans most in need? We should start by extending unemployment insurance benefits, currently scheduled to expire at the end of May. More than 100,000 additional jobs were lost in March, and the overall number of jobs fell to a 40-month low. We should help the states, which are facing the worst budget crisis in 50 years. To close budget deficits, some states are cutting back school days, eliminating effective early education programs and eliminating health insurance coverage for our neediest families. We should support programs that encourage job creation, like boosting federal spending to improve our nation's highway system, money we are going to have to spend someday anyway. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, 47,000 jobs are created for every billion dollars spent on our highways and bridges.

That is the approach I support. Millions of Americans need help. Yet, the President insists on a tax cut that hurts those who need help most, and helps those who need it least. In Vermont we take care of our own, and as a nation we should do the same.

This is Jim Jeffords, Independent Senator of Vermont, thanks for listening.

Net radio, Google and more

New in the San Jose Mercury News:

• Dan Gillmor: Chairman leads surprisingly vigilant FTC.

• Mike Langberg: Net Radio Poses Threat to Local Broadcasters. Mike's take on commercial-free Internet radio.

• Two-part series on Google. Today, Google: An engine of change. By the way, just how lame is the Mercury News' website? There is no link to part 1 of the two-part series. No mention of part 1 in the Business section. And a search for Google on the site's search engine turns up this result:

No results were found for the query "Google". Please try another search.

Later: Tripped across a link to part 1, Inside Google, on another site.

Riordan delays tabloid's debut

LA Times: The debut of the new L.A. Examiner weekly tabloid, which I understand erstwhile bloggers Matt Welch and Ken Layne have been laboring over for months now, has been delayed until at least September by former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. Will it launch at all?

Here's the LA Examiner's own website on the latest developments.

Media muscle mutes other voices

More on the threat of media consolidation:

• Variety: A "brilliant strategy" by the Republican right is moving media toward consolidation, with the help of News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch and Clear Channel's Lowry Mays, says one TV producer.

• MoveOn.org: Media mergers are decreasing coverage of local politics, local business and local events, making it harder and harder for Americans to find out what's going on in their own back yards, writes Eli Pariser.

Also check out IWantMedia, which provided those pointers.

Protecting anonymity online

Here's a timely and good idea to protect users' online rights. The EFF reports:

Tomorrow Assemblymember Joe Simitian (D - Palo Alto) will present to the California Assembly's Judiciary Committee a bill designed to protect the privacy of anonymous Internet speakers.

A broad coalition of organizations -- including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the California Anti-SLAPP Project, the Northern California chapter of the ACLU, and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse -- support the bill. The bill was drafted by the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley.

Assembly Bill 1143 would require that ISPs notify a consumer of any request to divulge the consumer's identity when that consumer's personally identifying information is sought in a civil suit. The bill passed out of the Assembly Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism and Internet Media Committee on April 29, 2003.

The law would provide time and the necessary information for the consumer to object to the disclosure to the court. The legislation would not lessen the accountability of Internet users who are subject to valid legal claims, but it would ensure that individuals have the necessary time and information needed to protect their own privacy, as well as limit the growing problem of frivolous claims filed for the sole purpose of discovering the identity of an otherwise anonymous Internet user.

People speaking online have a wide variety of reasons for remaining anonymous, ranging from inappropriate or untimely disclosure of a medical condition, sexual orientation, or gender identity to the potential for retaliatory job loss, harassment, or violence.

Doctored image in British tabloid

The London Evening Standard ran a doctored news photo on its front page last month showing a throng of Iraqis supposedly celebrating the downfall of Saddam Hussein. This is perhaps more amusing than a cause for journalistic outrage, given how clumsily it was executed.

Thanks to Hylton for the pointer.

And speaking of Hylton, Corante now offers RSS for all its blogs. Terrific news, as I've been using RSS feeds more and more to stay on top of the best of the blogosphere.

Barlow's underappreciation of weblogs

It surprises me when I run across ruminations like this (on Dave Winer's Scripting News site) from people like John Perry Barlow, who ought to know better. (He also said in an interview earlier this year that the Internet seemed to be counterproductive to the peace movement.) Barlow still criss-crosses the globe, making the lecture/conference circuit for those who can cough up thousands of dollars in registration fees, but I haven't seen him writing much in the past five years. He'd make a fantastic -- and widely read -- blogger.

Understanding the accelerating rate of change

The scholar and author Ray Kurzweil gave a fascinating presentation last fall about society's accelerating rate of change. Now he and Chris Meyer have put together a short Q&A on the subject on the KurzweilAI site.

Warning to inkjet printer shoppers

If you're in the market for an inkjet printer, I have two words of warning about the Epson Stylus C80, which we bought early last year:

The C80 balks mightily if you try to use any refilled or discounted cartridges that come from a manufacturer other than Epson (thus, it costs about $28 per black ink cartridge). Twice I tried buying cartridges that cost one half to one third that amount, and both times the printer would not accept them.

Second, be prepared for a flashing green warning light for weeks on end. When the ink levels are running low, the C80 lets you know with a vengeance. The C80's light has blinked approximately 1,632,960 times since it determined that I was running low about three weeks ago. OK, OK, I get it. Perhaps there's a way to disable this annoying feature, but I haven't discovered the secret passageway.

A web antidote for political apathy

Wired News: In October, the BBC will launch a radical experiment in online democracy -- a website for turning ordinary citizens into grassroots political activists

Everybody gets a cut

From the NY Times Sunday Magazine: DVDs give viewers dozens of choices -- and that's the problem.

Clear Channel sells concert CDs on the spot

NY Times: Clear Channel Communications, the radio broadcasting and concert promotion giant, plans to introduce a venture today that will sell live recordings on compact disc within five minutes of a show's conclusion. The venture, Instant Live, will enable a band's still-sweating fans to leave with a musical souvenir instead of say, a pricey T-shirt or a glossy program.

Children at the technology helm

Commentary in the NY Times: Much is made of the technological prowess of the younger generation. But a little-noticed side effect is the ineptitude that afflicts parents who cede the role of the household's chief technology officer to their offspring.

Why Gary Hart wants to blog

Wired News: Why Gary Hart wants to blog.

Meantime, I'm not exactly sure who's publishing this Howard Dean group weblog, but it appears to be some of his campaign staffers.

Feeling the boot heel of the Patriot Act

A uniformly depressing news day. Here's a commentary from the LA Times: Feeling the Boot Heel of the Patriot Act. You have to wonder why this didn't appear in the New York Times.

Several weeks ago, my roommate Asher and I went to an Indian restaurant just off Times Square in the heart of midtown Manhattan. We helped ourselves to the buffet and sat down to begin eating.

Suddenly there was a terrible commotion and five police officers in bulletproof vests stormed down the stairs. They had their guns drawn and were pointing them indiscriminately at the restaurant staff and at us.

"Go to the back of the restaurant," they yelled. I hesitated, lost in my own panic. "Did you not hear me? Go to the back and sit down," they demanded. I complied and looked around at the other patrons. There were eight men including the waiter, all of South Asian descent and ranging from late teens to senior citizen. One of the officers pointed his gun in the waiter's face and shouted: "Is there anyone else in the restaurant?" The waiter, terrified, gestured to the kitchen.

The police placed their fingers on the triggers of their guns and kicked open the kitchen doors. Shouts emanated from the kitchen and a few seconds later five Latino men crawled out on their hands and knees, guns pointed at them.

After patting us all down, the five officers seated us at two tables. As they continued to kick open doors to closets and restrooms with their fingers glued to their triggers, officials in business suits emerged from the stairwell. Two walked over to our table and identified themselves as agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Homeland Security Department.

Having some limited knowledge of the rights afforded to U.S. citizens, I asked why we were being held. The INS agent said we would be released once they confirmed that there were no outstanding warrants against us and our immigration status was OK.

In pre-9/11 America, the legality of this would have been questionable. After all, the 4th Amendment states: "The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. "

"You have no right to hold us," said Asher. But they explained that they did: This was a homeland security investigation under the authority of the Patriot Act. ...

Posted by jdlasica at 06:53 PM | Permalink | Conversation (0) | TrackBack (0)

Shadowy gov. program snoops on immigrants

My friend Jane Black has a new story up at Business Week Online: At Justice, NSEERS Spells Data Chaos. This shadowy program has gathered extensive personal data on immigrants. But who has the info, and what's it being used for? Answers are hard to find. Excerpt:

I'm holding in my hands documents that don't exist, according to a Justice Dept. spokesman. The forms -- 21 pages worth -- are from 7 of the 76 regional bureaus of the Immigration & Naturalization Service, a bureaucracy formerly part of Justice that moved to the new Homeland Security Dept. on Mar. 1. These forms list anywhere from a dozen to three dozen questions presented to 130,000 males last winter, mostly Muslim immigrants required to "special register" with the INS so that the government could keep better tabs on foreign nationals.

Music labels may sabotage computers of infringers

NY Times: Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy. Record companies are financing the development of software that would sabotage the computers of people that download pirated music. Excerpt:

ome of the world's biggest record companies, facing rampant online piracy, are quietly financing the development and testing of software programs that would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people who download pirated music, according to industry executives.

The record companies are exploring options on new countermeasures, which some experts say have varying degrees of legality, to deter online theft: from attacking personal Internet connections so as to slow or halt downloads of pirated music to overwhelming the distribution networks with potentially malicious programs that masquerade as music files.

The covert campaign, parts of which may never be carried out because they could be illegal under state and federal wiretap laws, is being developed and tested by a cadre of small technology companies, the executives said. ...

Among the more benign approaches being developed is one program, considered a Trojan horse rather than a virus, that simply redirects users to Web sites where they can legitimately buy the song they tried to download.

A more malicious program, dubbed "freeze," locks up a computer system for a certain duration ó minutes or possibly even hours ó risking the loss of data that was unsaved if the computer is restarted. It also displays a warning about downloading pirated music. Another program under development, called "silence," scans a computer's hard drive for pirated music files and attempts to delete them. One of the executives briefed on the silence program said that it did not work properly and was being reworked because it was deleting legitimate music files, too.

Other approaches that are being tested include launching an attack on personal Internet connections, often called "interdiction," to prevent a person from using a network while attempting to download pirated music or offer it to others.

This is, frankly, pretty astonishing.

A couple of rich guys

Gotta like the fan's sign at tonight's Blazers-Mavs game in Portland, with Paul Allen and Mark Cuban in attendance:

Our billionaire can beat your billionaire.

Misquoting Google

MSNBC.com's Jonathan Dube in Poynter.org on journalists who misquote Google.

TiVo for radio

Jim Griffin (guest blogger at BoingBoing.net) mentioned this to me in a phone conversation yesterday, and Steve Outing has an item about it today in E-Media Tidbits (whose perma-links continue to elude me):

Oooh! Oooh! I've been waiting for this: A portable device that does for radio what TiVo does for television. PoGo! Products has introduced the Radio YourWay portable digital AM/FM radio recorder. With it, you can record radio programming (manually, or by setting a timer) for later playback -- and the ability to fast-forward past commercials or obnoxious disc-jockey chatter. I knew this device would come eventually. It's another in a long line of new technologies that give the consumer control over various forms of media. If history holds true, then the radio industry will now try to thwart it -- a pointless strategy, yet sadly inevitable.

Soft money ban struck down

Breaking news: A federal court today struck down most of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law, the Associated Press reports.

While I'm a fervent supporter of the First Amendment, we've got to find a way to level the playing field -- and convince the courts that special interests buying influence in Washington poses a grave threat to our democracy.

How to become a Google star

SearchEngineWatch has a column offering 10 tips on how to get found in Google.

Sorkin splits from 'West Wing'

Executive producers Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme are leaving "The West Wing" after this season.

Digital multicasting: TV's next frontier

Mermigas On Media: Consultant and former ABC exec Fred Silverman says: "You will probably see more change in the next 10 years than at any point in the history of television." Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

NY Times reporter resigns

Associated Press via Yahoo!: Reporter Jayson Blair resigned after he was accused of appropriating material from a story in the San Antonio Express-News about a Texas woman whose son was killed in combat in Iraq. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

The perils of media concentration

Larry Lessig has taken up the challenge of publicizing the dangers we face as a society if media concentration continues unabated. This is coming to a head because the FCC is expected to release new rules one month from today that will relax media ownership rules. From his blog:

On June 2, the FCC is scheduled to release new rules governing media ownership. The expectation is that the revised rules will remove limits on media concentration. The consequence of that change will be an extraordinary increase concentration, in an already concentrated industry.

These issues are hard. Big is not necessarily bad. Change in media structure is not necessarily corruption of media content. But the more I have read about creators worried about this increase in concentration, the more I have looked at this issue.

Surprisingly or not, the issue of media concentration is not being covered adequately by the media ó that same media that will be affected by the changes in these rules. So that makes this ripe for the media in this space.

Iíve got a bunch of stories and statistics to report, and will. But this is something we need many many voices to report. Where else will the news not fit to print get printed ó except in weblog space?

Other pointers on this subject:

• Future of Music Coalition letter to FCC chairman Michael Powell.

• Copyfight: Media Concentration: Out from Under the Wire.

• Reason Online: The Myth of Media Deregulation: What the Senators Won't Ask Clear Channel.

• AlterNet: Showdown at the FCC.

• Columbia Journalism Review: The Gathering Storm Over Media Ownership.

• AlterNet: Clear Channel's Big, Stinking Deregulation Mess.

• AlterNet: The Death of Local News.

• NOW: Bill Moyers interviews Barry Diller, in which Moyers asks, Moyersí asks, Doesnít the explosion in the number of channels mean we have more diversity?

Diller: ìNo. Because what we have is an absolute fact that five companies control 90 percent of all of it. It has been reconstituted. Instead of it being three channels that were controlled by a few people, there are now 500 controlled by a few people.î

• Guardian UK: Diller says media need 'more regulation, not less.'

Buzz over iTunes Store

Wired News: Apple's new online music store is a home run with customers: Opening-day downloads rival six months' worth of legal downloads from all the competing services. But it's still in its early days with holes in its catalog and limitations on song sharing.

Dear Mr. President

Also in the Merc: Dear Mr. President -- An Open Letter from Silicon Valley. "We're in a world of hurt, and we could use some help."

Students settle file swapping suit

From today's San Jose Merc:

The recording industry has settled lawsuits against four students it accused of creating and operating Napster-like file-trading networks on campus.

The Recording Industry Association of America agreed Thursday to settlements of $12,000 to $17,500 apiece to be paid over four years, saying the case was intended to discourage unauthorized music downloading on campus -- not financially devastate the individual students. The suits initially sought penalties of up to $150,000 per pirated song.

Who owns a writer's creativity?

More on the point-counterpoint essays, by myself and Eric Meyer, on a newspaper's ability to squelch an employer's personal weblog:

Ed Cone writes:

Meyer clearly holds weblogs in disdain. "Some of us concentrate on creating things of value, not opinion, for posting online," he sneers.

But this strikes me as Meyer's greatest misstatement: "Whenever you hire a professional journalist, you hire, among other things, his or her creativity. If the creativity you thought you were hiring is being siphoned off by some outside activity, you have every right to ask that such activity cease."

Creativity is not a finite resource. It feeds on itself. As a writer, I write better and more fluidly the more I write. It's more like a candle lighting another candle than a ladle emptying a pot. And creativity isn't something you leave at work, either. A company doesn't own its employees' downtime.

Sheila also has some good pointers on Ethics 101 at projo.com, including:

• Freedom of political expression: Do journalists forfeit their right?

• Workplace issues in the newsroom.

• Author! Author! Ethical dilemmas when reporters turn author.

Rhetorica also weighs in on the issue.

Yudkovitz the new president of TiVo

An old college friend, Marty Yudkovitz (we worked together at the Rutgers Targum), whom I interviewed for my book on the digital rights wars a few months back during his tenure as president of NBC Internet, is joining TiVo as its new president.

Reuters reports he'll where he will focus on making deals with content creators to generate additional revenue. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

99 cents a song: too high?

Wired News: Apple CEO Steve Jobs made headlines this week when he unveiled a sleek music download service that charges users 99 cents a song. But some experts say that's just not cheap enough to lure away users from free peer-to-peer file-trading networks.

True, but to many people, even 50 cents a song may be too high if they can get them for free. 99 cents for a song with no strings attached, which you can keep forever, is a bargain. I plan to climb aboard the iTunes Music Store bandwagon later today.

Let journalists blog!

The Hartford Courtant's decision to force a newsroom employee to halt his independent personal weblog has stirred up a hornet's nest both in the blogging community and online news circles.

Jonathan Dube, MSNBC.com technology editor and publisher of CyberJournalist.net, asked me to compile my critique of the Courant's decision into an essay, which just went up on CyberJournalist. Accompanying it is a counterpoint by Eric Meyer, a professor at the University of Illinois who defended the Courant's action.

I'll publish my thoughts here as well ...

The decision by the editor of the Hartford Courant to order the closing of a newsroom staffer's independent weblog was an abuse of power, a move that was not only misguided but one that sends a chilling effect through the journalistic blogging community.

Let's summarize events to date:

Denis Horgan, the travel editor of the Hartford Courant, decided to begin writing an independent weblog. He did so on his own time. He used not a scintilla of the Courant's resources to do so. He did not discuss the Courant or his job at the newspaper in his weblog. He did not leverage his association with the Courant in his blog (the fact that he disclosed his relationship with the Courant in passing on an inside page should be applauded). He was not freelancing for a competing publication, did not make a penny from his weblog, and in no way competed online with the Courant.

Despite all of the above, Courant editor Brian Toolan decided to order the weblog killed because a weblog by a newsroom staffer created "a parallel journalistic universe" (read: our monopoly power to publish is under
assault)
"without any editing oversight by the Courant" (the time-honored control freak rationale). Added 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!

Who owns journalists' mindshare?

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? Here is your answer. Toolan and his merry band of control-niks believe that newsroom employees are chattel. We can't have journalists expressing views online because then someone somewhere might accuse them of not being wholly chaste, objective, devoid of opinions. Such a view flies in the face of human nature. Reporters and editors are talented, creative people who hold opinions on a variety of subjects. 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 minefield, one strewn with certain risks for an established media company. Several commentators have written about the issues associated with allowing newsroom staffers to maintain officially sanctioned weblogs under the news organization's umbrella. 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 merely having a blog.

Blog -- but tread carefully

How far should the Toolan proposition extend? Or, as my friend and colleague 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 does not apply here. Writing a personal weblog and freelancing for a competing alternative publication in town are vastly different things ethically, journalistically and legally. Freelancing for a rival publication falls squarely within the legitimate purview of a news organization. But under Eric's definition, any personal writing in cyberspace would constitute "freelancing." Publishing a weblog is no different than publishing a personal website; blogging software merely makes the update process easier. I'll wager that no court would find any legal distinction between what I post at jdlasica.com and what I post at jdlasica.com/blog/. To suggest, then, that a newspaper has the right to force a newsroom staffer to kill his weblog is tantamount to saying the newspaper has the right to prevent newsroom staffers from publishing any personal website, or perhaps even from posting comments to an online-news mailing list. Woe to ye who enters a newsroom -- you must remove yourself from all quarters of cyberspace. No pictures of the kids. No photos of your cat. No online family tree, no archive of writings. A fairly sad state of affairs -- and patently absurd.

Horgan was not leveraging his status as an employee into some outside venture, so that offense does not 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 was, however, clearly injecting himself into public debate, on subjects as diverse as the Iraq war, same-sex unions and the Boston Red Sox. So here is where his offense lies.

The virgin theory of journalism

Under such a curious formulation of newsroom etiquette, journalists must be virgins, unsoiled by even the appearance of participating in tawdry public debate. So 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? (Some are ñ such is the sad state of affairs in the control-driven world of newspapers.) Should keeping a diary or journal be verboten if one shows it to one's friends?

Journalists who blog 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. And not submitting to the fiction that the news organization owns its employees' opinions.

Take a look at CyberJournalist.net's list of the dozens of journalists who publish independent personal weblogs, and then consider the idea that the majority of them could be killed off at the whim of their employer. What arrogance. Most outsiders would be shocked to learn that newspapers believe they can control the personal outside activities of their employees. No other employer -- a university or tech corporation -- would cling to such hubris.

Bring the blogging in house

One solution to this sorry affair would have been to bring Horgan's weblog under the paper's wing. I'm not sure that would have worked in this case, but newspapers in general 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.

During the Iraq war, I was among those who crit
icized CNN and Time magazine for forcing their correspondents in the Middle East to abandon their personal weblogs. As CNN told a writer for the Online Journalism Review, ìCNN.com prefers to take a more structured approach to presenting the news. We do not blog." While I disagree with CNNís decision to silence the blog of its producer -- all parties would have won by bringing Kevin Sitesí blog under CNN's domain -- the decision could be defended because Sites was in the Middle East only by virtue of his association with CNN.

The same canít be said for the Courantís decision, which overreaches on every level.

Several posters on Horgan's site suggested that he begin writing a weblog under a pen name; there are even some services that provide anonymous weblogging. I think that's a bad 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 to a newspaper blogger in Texas. At the same time, decisions such as the Courant's will inevitably lead newsroom staffers to consider such a course.

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. Weíll see how this plays out, but it just may be that a newsroom employee enjoys the same freedom of speech as a waitress, custodian or business executive, at least in Connecticut.

An opportunity, not a threat

Why do some mainstream media outlets fear blogs by journalists? Blogging empowers individuals at the expense of the carefully constructed newsroom hierarchy. It busts down the bureaucracy into a level playing field -- a democratic playing field where your ideas count more than your pecking order in the organization's flow chart. I've seen newsroom interns who have more thoughtful things to say than senior managers. But the solution is not to silence the intern, it's to widen and elevate the level of discourse.

Those of us who love newspapers wonder why fewer people trust the news media these days. We express puzzlement at why more and more talented journalists are leaving the profession. Some of the answers can be gleaned from this single episode of big media hypocrisy.

JD Lasica
Senior Editor, Online Journalism Review (ojr.org)
Personal weblog: http://jdlasica.com/blog/