Media Giraffe Project -- <br>Link & reference blog: November 2005

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

RESEARCH: Youth using Internet to engage in civic affairs, Wisconsin study finds

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.news.wisc.edu/11892.html
http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~dshah/

SOURCE: Univ. of Wisconsin news release

Youth log online for civic engagement
November 29, 2005

By Dennis Chaptman

Use of the Internet as a resource and a forum strongly influences participation in civic affairs, often more than traditional media and even face-to-face communication, according to a study by a UW-Madison
journalism professor.

The study by Dhavan Shah, published in the October edition of the journal Communication Research, analyzes data from surveys conducted during and after the 2000 presidential election and concludes that the Internet can rival the effects of newspapers in spurring citizens to action.

That is a significant finding, since Internet use tends to be more prevalent among young people - a wired generation often assumed to be disconnected from civic life.

"One hopeful piece of news from this is that young people are taking advantage of the Internet in a way that may be a sign of civic renewal," Shah says. "Everything points to the idea that this may be an important pathway to the involvement of young people in civic life."

Shah says his study illustrates how the Internet can be a potent tool not just for community organizers, but in promoting the long-term health of democracy itself.

"The Internet is something that tends to involve those who are least inclined to be public-spirited - if they use the Internet in certain ways - to become very public spirited and very civically engaged," he adds.

The study's conclusions are also significant because they show the potential for the Internet to be a dynamic, interactive medium able to build citizen participation in public life. Although some scholars have criticized online communication as eroding social connections and encouraging people to withdraw instead of become engaged, Shah's study found that certain uses of the Internet can actually heighten civic participation.

"Although this analysis cannot vindicate the Internet as a cause of social withdrawal, it certainly suggests that when two of the most popular uses of the Internet - browsing and e-mailing - are used to gain information and express opinions about public affairs, they have substantial potential to affect the health of a civil society," the study found.

That potential has likely increased since the surveys were conducted, with the rise of online phenomena such as blogging, says Shah, who plans to expand on the study by analyzing data from the 2004 elections - in conjunction with political advertising data developed by the Wisconsin Advertising Project.

The strong correlation between using the Internet as a tool of political expression and engagement in public life underscore its potential to enable civic participation without the traditional limitations of face-to-face communication, Shah says. Additionally, the study concluded that television news - despite claims that the entire medium has a demobilizing effect - has some positive, indirect effects on triggering civic participation.

The study also found that both online and offline information gathering culminates in civic participation. That tends to discount earlier theories that there are two distinct pathways to civic participation - one online and the other offline - and that political uses of the Internet dampen civic action and often lead to a dead end.

Shah says that future research needs to probe how people use various media over time, instead of concentrating on how much they use them, when studying their effects on civic activism.

Dhavan V. Shah is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches and studies political and strategic communication. He is faculty in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and affiliated
faculity in the Department of Political Science. His research concerns the social psychology of media effects with particular attention to communication influences on political judgment, public opinion, and civic participation. To date, he has authored nearly 50 journal articles and book chapters.

DHAVAN V. SHAH, Professor
School of Journalism & Mass Communication
Department of Political Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison
5162 Vilas Communication Hall
821 University Avenue
Madison,WI 53706-1497
Phone: (608) 262-0388
Fax: (608) 262-1361
E-mail: dshah@wisc.edu

----------------------------------------------------------------

The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

# posted by newshare @ 11:35 PM 0 comments

EDUCATION: British duo launches international web-based PDF paper for kids over 9

http://www.editorsweblog.org/news/2005/11/new_electronic_newspaper_for_kids.php#more
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/11/prweb315755.htm

Newsademic.com
Hill House
210 Upper Richmond Road
London
SW15 6NP
http://www.newsademic.com/

A new international newspaper called Newsademic targeting younger readers (from
age 9 onwards) has been launched. The objective of the paper is to be a source
of information "for younger people who are keen to begin to understand what.s
going on around them and to make sense of the world they are growing up in."

Newsademic is the brainchild of Stephen Bradly a co-owner of Ley-Lines.com Ltd.
a project specific web site design and hosting company. The editor is Susan
Elkin.

Susan Elkin is a regular contributor to The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph
on education issues. She also writes for The Stage and a wide range of
magazines and has written several books. She taught in five schools and three
counties in England, most recently at Benenden School, Kent from 1993-2004.

The paper includes at least twenty articles on international events, book and
film reviews, a prize competition and a Sudoku puzzle and is distributed via
email as a printable file every two weeks. It is offered on a subscription
basis.

Articles cover economics, international politics, science and the environment.
The paper does not cover television, pop music, celebrities or sport, unless
there is a significant international news story related to any of these topics,
and nor does it carry advertisements.

Editor of Newsademic, Susan Elkin, said the following about the new paper:
"Currently most children have a very limited understanding of world events and
no time is allotted within the school timetable to cover them so I.m thrilled
to be helping to put that right." Ms. Elkin also believes the paper will be a
good learning tool for people learning English because it uses "straightforward
vocabulary".

For additional information please contact Stephen Bradly on 07989345685 or
Susan Elkin 01795 423708.

FROM THE WEBSITE:

Newsademic is a newspaper for young readers and anyone studying English as a
foreign language. Its aim is to educate and inform them about current
international news stories.

The newspaper is distributed by e-mail every fortnight. It can be read on
screen but has been designed to be printed out and read as a paper copy.

It is carefully written and edited for young people and English language
students. It does not carry advertising. Neither does it feature articles about
television, sport, computer games, pop music or celebrity culture. The focus is
on fortnightly international news events which shape and affect the world that
we live in today.

Newsademic has no political or ideological bias. Stories are reported factually
and every attempt is made to feature both sides of any situation in which
opinions differ.

Q: Can I advertise in newsademic?

A: No, current Newsademic policy is to not display any third party
advertisements. You may however E-mail admin@newsademic.com and ask us to keep
your details on record in the event that we change this policy in the future.

WEBSITE STATEMENT BY Susan Elkin, Editor

"Newsademic has two aims. First, we want to inform young readers about
international world happenings. Second, we are a useful study aid for anyone,
anywhere, learning English as a foreign language (EFL).

"It's fun to read as well as educational. Our editorial style and the choice of
Newsademic's content make sure of that. So does the inclusion of a prize
competition which doubles as a glossary on words used in that Issue's news
stories. And we have a review or two, of a worthwhile book, film, CD or other
work in each issue too.

"I spent many years teaching English. And I've always been conscious that
schools offer few opportunities for pupils to acquire and develop an
intelligent interest in international news, although it's a key part of
citizenship education.

"So that's the point and purpose of Newsademic. Easy to read, it gives
schools, pupils, families, young readers a stepping stone to adult news media.
And for EFL students it offers regular, topical reading material in
straightforward English.

"Of course we don't claim to have got everything right and we want to improve
and innovate as we go along. So please send me your suggestions, views - and
even praise, if you think it's due."

AUDIO: eDemocracy simplified, by Steven Clift

Steven Clift of eDemocracy Online in Minneapolis, Minn., has developed a 30-minute talk about building community life and democracy in the 21st century. "The Internet allows citizens to become everyday citzens anywhere, anytime, by deeply connecting them to things local, not just global," Clif says.

Clift, who has spoken in 25 nations -- including Mongolia, Iceland, Lebanon, and South Korea -- on eDemocracy concepts and practices, connects the best online realities in an optimistic recipe which he says will "counter the emerging virtual civil war among partisans online."

AUDIO LINK: http://dowire.org/media/everydaycitizens.mp3 (15MB)

MEDIA GIRAFFE PROFILE of Steven Clift:
http://www.mediagiraffe.org/profiles/index.php?action=profile&id=275

Steven L. Clift - - - W: http://publicus.net
Minneapolis - - - - E: clift@publicus.net
Minnesota - - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667
USA - - - - Skype/MSN/Y!/AIM: netclift
Democracies Online Newswire - http://dowire.org

# posted by newshare @ 3:37 PM 0 comments

AUDIO: Will NPR's podcasts birth a new business model for public radio?

URL: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/051129glaser/
Posted: 2005-11-29

Will NPR's podcasts birth a new business model for public radio?

How the public radio giant has become a leading podcaster in just two months.

By Mark Glaser
Online Journalism Review

Last summer, the folks running National Public Radio started to get a clear
message from their listeners and member stations: Give us podcasts! They
received e-mail requests from listeners for months, and the term "podcast"
was one of the most searched terms on NPR.org. The public spoke, and NPR
listened, launching podcasts on Aug. 31.

Talk about pent-up demand. According to Maria Thomas, vice president and
general manager of NPR Online, it took only six days after launch for NPR's
"Story of the Day" podcast to reach the coveted No. 1 spot on iTunes for
most downloaded podcast. On Nov. 21, NPR's podcasts held down 11 spots on
the iTunes Top 100, more than any other media outlet.

But NPR has done much more than simply repurpose its own material for
podcasts. The radio giant is hosting podcasts for member stations, and
selling and splitting underwriting revenues with them. Plus, it's launched
three original podcasts under the new alt.NPR brand as an incubator for
edgier content.

In a wide-ranging interview on NPR's podcasting initiatives, Thomas told me
that there were two driving forces for NPR: listener demand for portable
audio, and the chance to find a new business model for working with
stations. Previously, NPR's income was split evenly from fees paid for
content by member stations (who raised money from pledge drives), and
corporate and foundation underwriting spots. Podcasting gave NPR a new model
for selling underwriting, and sharing the proceeds with stations.

"We are actually working with a subset of stations that are providing audio
to us, and we're organizing that audio in a central database, so we can put
consistent inventory units around the audio," Thomas said. "And we would
sell those inventory units to underwriters, and if we are successful with
that, we would share that revenue with the stations. That's a different
model than what we have on the radio. The whole principle is that we'll have
to act differently on these new platforms because the model we have on the
radio might not work in this world -- but we have to be in this world." At
launch, NPR already had sold underwriting to Acura as a premier podcasting
sponsor.

So what makes NPR's podcasting a different animal? Rather than just offering
podcasts of entire NPR radio shows, the most popular NPR podcasts have been
"best of"-type offerings by topic. For instance, podcasts such as NPR
Movies, NPR Technology and NPR Music take content from various radio shows
on the same topic. That way, it's easier to sell to underwriters interested
in a particular topic.

On the news side, NPR has had success with its nightly podcast wrap-up of
hearings on the John Roberts Supreme Court nomination, and will repeat that
with the upcoming Samuel Alito hearings in January. The NPR podcast
directory now includes 174 podcasts (including those of member stations).
Thomas says the original 17 podcasts it offered from the start have been
downloaded more than 5 million times.

The importance of original content

While a lot of Big Media companies have jumped on the podcasting bandwagon,
much of the content is simply repurposed material from offline programming.
While NPR has done that with most of its podcasts, the alt.NPR brand is a
chance for NPR to look beyond the usual fare. The first three offerings for
alt.NPR include a commentary on the gambling world by NPR reporter Mike
Pesca, downtempo electronica music from independent Net radio station
SomaFM, and a selection of the best young public radio producers on Public
Radio Exchange (PRX.org) called "Youthcast."

These three mark different approaches to podcasts for NPR -- one being from
an in-house reporter, one being an exploration of new music, and another
taken from PRX, which has worked with NPR before. SomaFM receives a
freelance production fee from NPR.org, while PRX will share revenues from
underwriting that NPR sells. Thomas considers this as an experiment for NPR,
which will release more podcasts after it gauges the success of its attempts
so far.

"If we're going to make it on the portable platform, we have to act
differently," Thomas said. "With podcasting, we're acting like producers and
seeking new voices but at the same time we're working cooperatively with
stations to find a way to help all public radio become more meaningful,
which is something we didn't accomplish in the first 10 years of the
Internet."

So what type of content works best for podcast listeners? Thomas believes
that shorter content has been more popular, perhaps because people listening
to podcasts are multitasking and don't have the attention for long-form
content. A case in point is the "Story of the Day" podcast, which runs from
four to eight minutes, highlighting the editorial pick from NPR as the most
important and unique story that NPR produced that day. Because it has
occupied the No. 1 slot at iTunes for so long, Thomas believes it might be
the most downloaded podcast ever.

Kris Jacob is vice president of business development for PodShow, the
venture capital-backed startup from "podfather" Adam Curry, which is
aggregating podcasts into an ad network. Jacob told me that repurposed
mainstream content might bring in a larger podcast audience of consumers,
but that podcast listeners in general like the close bond they feel with
independent productions.

"The fundamental mistake that media companies, large and small, make is that
they adopt the model but not the philosophy," Jacob said. "They look at
things as the adjunct to the core product that they're providing, and not as
a fundamental shift in the way that they are creating media itself. ... What
listeners tell us is that mainstream programming converted to MP3 files and
redistributed and called a podcast is interesting to a point, but it's not
what they are really compelled by. What they are compelled by is unique
independent niche programming that appeals to them and allows them to
develop a relationship that they can't forge with mainstream programming."

Rusty Hodge, SomaFM's founder and general manager, agreed that shovelware
wouldn't cut it for podcasts, and that the democratizing effect of so many
new voices emerging was much more important.

"The most interesting content on the Internet has not been repurposed
content from somewhere else (which we've all heard already), it will be that
content that didn't have an outlet before," Hodge said via e-mail. "I think
that NPR is using the alt.NPR podcast project as an incubator, to try out
new content and explore areas that they don't have the space to do over the
air."

PRX has been running its own podcasts culled from all the radio pieces
people submit to PRX. (PRX acts as a non-profit intermediator between
independent producers and public radio stations and networks.) Plus, it
released Pubcatcher, a free podcast tool for public radio stations to use on
their sites. Jake Shapiro, executive director of PRX, told me that
podcasting might bring a new generation of talent into public radio.

"I have high hopes that out of this wave of energy around podcasting, with
all of these people trying to become audio producers, that a bunch of them
will emerge as truly talented new voices that will bridge into radio,"
Shapiro said. "It doesn't have to be either/or [podcasting or broadcasting].
My hope is that podcasting does identify a whole new rising generation that
is producing a different sound with different ears and that public radio
will embrace them."

The challenges and potential of podcast ads

As for making money or getting underwriting for podcasts, everyone agrees
that there are a slew of issues to iron out -- though there's a lot of
potential. First off, anyone who sells advertising usually has to have
metrics on the audience: who is listening, how often do they listen, what's
the demographic of listeners. These remain a mystery for podcasts, because
there is no current way to track who actually listens to podcasts. Just
because you subscribe to a podcast, doesn't mean you upload it to your MP3
player or listen to it.

NPR.org's Thomas admits that this is an initial problem, but she said she
hopes to get listener information when technology companies can solve the
metrics issue, as long as it doesn't invade personal privacy.

Along with the measurement dilemma, there's also bandwidth costs to
consider. The more popular your podcast is, the more it costs to support
downloads. Thomas says NPR.org has already been serving streaming audio for
some time, so it could negotiate good bandwidth deals with vendors.

"We went into this business with eyes wide open because we've been streaming
audio -- lots of it -- on NPR.org for nearly a decade," Thomas said. "We did
a lot of work upfront, pushed hard on vendors and [did] estimating and
scenario planning. Frankly it helped shape our content offerings. We're
keeping it shorter not just for the user experience. I'm not at all
convinced someone wants to listen to two hours of 'Morning Edition' on an
iPod. You're penalized for success, but we're trying to build an
infrastructure that supports a business."

Another issue is the intrusiveness of ads on podcasts, a medium born out of
people's frustration with the ad-saturated nature of broadcast radio. So
far, most podcasts have toned down the commercialism, and tried to use more
low-key sponsorships and spots voiced by the host. NPR has an advantage
because it is already well versed in using less intrusive ads in its radio
and Web programming.

Thomas told me NPR would only do one "gateway" sponsor ad for 12 to 15
seconds at the beginning of podcasts, along with a three-second closer at
the end. For podcasts less than 30 minutes long, that would be the limit.
For longer podcasts, NPR is experimenting with a sponsor ad in the middle of
content. Host-spoken ads would likely only happen in entertainment offerings
-- not in news podcasts.

PodShow's Jacob says the potential for advertising in podcasts is
"absolutely huge." But rather than repurpose radio ads, advertisers and ad
agencies will have to get more creative, and collaborate more with the
audience.

"The research we've done indicates strongly that the listeners are
interested in interesting advertising," Jacob said. "They don't want the
same thing they're getting in the mainstream. They want to participate in
that process. That has to do with context, with host involvement, and it has
to do with the advertisers, the agencies, the buyers and [PodShow] all being
very creative about how we do this, and listening to the response."

While Madison Avenue types are swarming over the prospects of ads in
podcasts, the typical DIY podcaster shouldn't expect to get a windfall
profit anytime soon. SomaFM's Hodge says that it's hard, but not impossible,
to make a living doing independent podcasts. Though SomaFM has been going
strong since 1999, Hodge still has a day job running Internet operations for
a computer hardware maker.

"If you start by saying, 'I'm going to start a podcast or Net radio station
and get rich,' you're on the wrong footing," Hodge said. "It takes a long
time to get established, and it will be a lot of work to become successful.
But I know some folks running Net radio stations who are mostly supporting
themselves from it. They're not getting rich, but they're making an OK
living. And you'll have to really hustle as a salesperson if you're going to
get sponsors (or donors for that matter). You can't just sit back and expect
the money to come to you."

This article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

# posted by newshare @ 3:24 PM 0 comments

Monday, November 28, 2005

Toronto Star columnist on putting journalism ahead of profits

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1133133016399&call_pageid=968350072197&col=969048863851

Newspapers must put journalism before bottom line
Nov. 28, 2005. 05:48 AM

ANTONIA ZERBISIAS
The Toronto Star

When he died in 1948, the Toronto Star's former owner and publisher Joseph
Atkinson stipulated in his will that the public interest should supersede
profits.

This "paper for the people'' philosophy has made the Star the most
successful newspaper in Canada.

It's all about, in the words of the late American newspaperman H.L.
Mencken, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.

There's a similar mindset at the U.S. newspaper giant, Knight Ridder,
which publishes 32 dailies, including the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia
Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News.

This month the chain, the second-largest in the United States, made
headlines when it announced it was putting itself up for sale because its
sagging stock price wasn't rich enough for its three biggest shareholders:
Private Capital Management LP of Naples, Fla., which has 19 per cent, plus
Southeastern Asset Management with just under 10 per cent and Harris
Associates LP with about 8 per cent.

A sale is expected to break up the company at best, or degrade the titles
to pay off the resulting debt to such an extent that their journalism will
not be worth the paper it's printed on.

Private Capital Management in particular is pressuring Knight Ridder for a
better return, as it's not happy with last year's 19.4 per cent operating
profit margin.

It also threatens to nominate its own slate of directors at the company's
annual meeting next April, because it hasn't received satisfaction on its
"serious concerns'' regarding its investment.

Now, despite all the falling circulation and dwindling advertising in the
paper business, it's still a rich game.

According to The State of the News Media 2005, from the Project for
Excellence in Journalism, affiliated with Columbia University Graduate
School of Journalism, "as businesses, newspapers are strong, highly
profitable and resilient."

In fact, "the industry now boasts operating margins in the low-to-mid-20
per cent range, a bit less than Microsoft and Dell but higher even than
pharmaceuticals.''

Even as the department stores disappeared along with their advertising,
newspapers have adapted, with special sections devoted to cars, computers
and condominiums, as well as other products such as freebie commuter
dailies.

Of course, circulation is declining.

This month, an industry average drop of 2.6 per cent was recorded,
although some papers such as The New York Times held steady. That didn't
stop the company from cutting 500 jobs, including 80 newsroom positions at
both the Times and its sister publication, The Boston Globe.

There are two main forces behind the readership drop. The first is that
young people aren't picking up the paper and the second is, of course, the
Internet.

Apparently, the folks at Private Capital Management . which snapped up
most of its Knight Ridder stock last summer . didn't get the memo on that
downward trend in circulation.

What's more, Knight Ridder has generally not performed as well as other
newspaper companies because it tends to invest in quality journalism.

It also has a more progressive outlook.

Which is why some Knight Ridder employees are very suspicious about the
For Sale sign on their corporate door.

The Daily News' Will Bunch, for example, on his company blog, recently
documented the rich donations made by the top executives of Private
Capital Management to the Republican National Committee and the
Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign.

"Say what you will about Knight Ridder's business practices, but when it
comes to journalism, they do a remarkably good job of getting out of the
way," blogged Bunch.

"Thus, the liberal editorial voice of the Daily News and the Inquirer, and
the amazing work by Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, which was one of
the few media voices casting doubt in 2002 and 2003 on whether Iraq had
WMD and posed a threat to America."

As it turns out, that company, not unlike the Star, subscribes to a
"creed,'' handed down by co-founder John S. Knight.

This is why some 60 prominent Knight Ridder alumni, including Pulitzer
prize winners and the Inquirer's Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down), signed an
open letter this month, announcing that they planned to nominate their own
directors.

"Knight Ridder is not merely another public company," they wrote.

"It is a public trust. It must balance corporate profitability with civic
purpose. We oppose those who would cripple the purpose by coercing more
profit. We abhor those for whom good business is insufficient and
excellent journalism is irrelevant."

To them, and toner-stained wretches in newsrooms everywhere, the strategy
for survival is clear: It is to not cave in to shortsighted bottom-liners
who demand extraordinary profit margins in the near term while destroying
the product in the long run.

In the business of newspapers, greed is just bad news.

# posted by newshare @ 10:04 PM 0 comments

RESOURCE: Independent Media marketplaces for books, videos sold from new COA News website

COA News just developed a Independent Media Marketplace(IMM) (http://imediamarketplace.org ) for books, magazines and videos. You can also sign up to IMM Update to be notified when the IMM (Independent Media Marketplace) has new media products available. http://www.coanews.org/lists/index.php?p=subscribe&id=1

"Coalition of Awareness"

FROM THE WEBSITE:

COA News is a Canadian-based is a non-profit online news network featuring diverse, credible independent news organizations. COA News can best be described as the portal to independent news media. The COA is published by:

The Center For Information Awareness.
384 Amberlee Court
Newmarket, Ontario, Canada
L3X-1E8

Staff
Steve Anderson (steve{@}coanews.org): Managing Editor
Krystle Kingston (krystle{@}coanews.org): Environment Editor
Lindsay Carrocci (lcarrocc{@}uwo.ca): Media Editor
Arthur Krebbers: News Editor
News section - news{@}coanews.org

The Center For Information Awareness(CFIA)is a registered non-profit organization dedicated to bringing awareness to world events and situations by proving free access to world reporting and promoting alternative channels of information.

Their initiatives include but are not limited to:

-- Creating open, free community email lists
-- Promoting the independent media through local and international campaigns
-- Creating a venue for independent news organizations to feature their material and thus expose it to new and broader audiences.

We at The Center For Information Awareness know that in order for democracy to function and for powerful structures to be held accountable, citizens need to have access to unfiltered information. A certain degree of transparency is necessary for democracy to work. In providing a space for citizens to communicate freely, we think the powerful will be more accountable to the public.

# posted by newshare @ 2:36 PM 0 comments

Feisty dialog or comfortable cocoons? CBS News exec considers journalism future

Will consumers engage in feisty dialog or retire to cocoons of comfortable opinion as a result of new information technology? That's the question posed by Andrew Hayward, president of CBS News. Hayward was part of an Oct. 5, 2005, panel at the "We Media: Behold the Power of Us," conference at The Associated Press headquarters in New York City. And Hayward says its the central issue journalism must face.

The conference was organized by The Media Center, the think-tank arm of the newspaper publisher-sponsored American Press Institute. His comments were made generally.Here is Hayward verbatim, as transcribed from the MP3 download of the the panel he was on:

" . . . [A]t its worst you will have an atomized world in which people only have access to, or only choose access to, the news and opinions that they're interested in, and you'll have a completely splintered society where even though the information is available, for those who are actively willing to seek it, to learn about public affairs, most people will live in a comfortable cocoon of their own self-reinforced opinions and it's going to be even harder to reach consensus on the issues of the day.

"And I think we have to grapple with those contradictions and discuss them rather than, recycling what frankly to me were fairly familiar criticisms. It's doesn't mean they are not valid. They're familiar because they've been around for a long time. But i think looking ahead is a lot trickier than looking in the rear-view mirror."

SOURCE: MP3 of panel at "We Media":
http://www.mediacenter.org/wemedia05/the_program.html
http://www.mediacenter.org/wemedia05/audio/we_media_we_inc_100505.mp3

# posted by newshare @ 9:16 AM 0 comments

OPINION: Mainstream media not under corporate control, CBS news chief says

Here's a view about the extent to which mainstream media's news agenda is set
by multi-industry corporate owners.

The comments below are from Andrew Hayward, president of CBS News. He was on an Oct. 5, 2005, panel at the "We Media: Behold the Power of Us," conference at The Associated Press headquarters in New York City. The conference was organized by The Media Center, the think-tank arm of the newspaper publisher-sponsored American Press Institute. His comments were made generally.Here is Hayward verbatim, as transcribed from the MP3 download of the the panel he was on:

"One of the misunderstands about these conglomerates, certainly maybe not in this room, which is a sophisticated audience, but among the public at large, is that the conglomerates are actively telling us what to cover and actively censoring or blocking stories based on what advertisers want. That is not true. There is still a very solid firewall in this country between news providers and sponsors, and to the degree it becomes permeable, I think there are going to be a lot of watchdogs who are going to sound the alarm.

"I think the real issues is what the vice president correctly said -- its the sins of omission that are more important to me than the sins of commission, because you can always ignore the Lacy Peterson or the runaway bride, but not having a vigorous debate about global warming or about what is going on in the classrooms -- that is something that we can tag the media with -- however we also have to look again at the marketplace and the audience . . . the fact is if there weren't the marketplace for the runaway bride it wouldn't be on as much as it is . . . I don't think we can wish away the influence of the marketplace on American media."

Hayward's comments earlier about the future of media were interesting as well.
Here's an excerpt:

"We're at the very early stages of development in the democracy that could go one of several ways. At its best, the disaggregation of content, the lowering of barriers of entry to news, and inforramtion and opinion providers sare in fact a very good thing that could recreate the kind of feisty dialog that the Founding Fathers had in mind when they created the town meeting model for our democracy. At its worst . . . and the vice president even cited this case of the sudden upsurge in the number of emails urging that a particular professor be fired . . . at its worst you will have an atomized world in which people have, or chose, access only to the things that they are interested in and you will have a completely splintered society where even though the information is available, for those who are actively willing to seek it, to learn about public affairs, most people will live in a comfortable cocoon of their own self-reinforced opinions and its going to be even harder to reac!
h consensus on the issues of the day. And I think we have to grapple with those contradictions and discuss them rather than, recycling what to me are fairly familiar criticisms. It's not that they aren't valid. They're familiar because they've been around for a long time. But i think looking ahead is a lot trickier than looking in the rear-view mirror."

# posted by newshare @ 9:08 AM 0 comments

Sunday, November 27, 2005

FIRST AMENDMENT: Comcast aiming to control the content it delivers?

URL: http://www.freepress.net/news/9074
URL: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/business/12095299.htm
PUBLISHED: July 10, 2005

Comcast aiming to control the content it delivers

By Tony Gnoffo
The Philadelphia Inquirer

LOS ANGELES -- When former Disney executive Charles Hirschhorn had an idea for a new TV network, he called one of his old Disney associates.

Stephen B. Burke, Comcast Corp.'s chief operating officer and the president of its cable business, was driving home when Hirschhorn reached him on his cell phone and announced that he was coming to Philadelphia to pitch an idea. Burke recalled the conversation like this: "I said, 'Before you waste the airfare, why don't you tell me what you have in mind?' And he says, 'MTV for video gamers.' I pulled the car over to the side of the road and told him to get over here right away." So was born the G4 Video Game Network.

Philadelphia, Hollywood is calling.

Comcast came up short in its bid last year to buy the Walt Disney Co., that icon of American entertainment. But Burke and Comcast chairman Brian L. Roberts nevertheless have become media moguls of considerable influence.

Their power base is Comcast.s huge audience: the 21.6 million households that subscribe to the company.s cable service. They give any channel owned or blessed by Comcast instant traction . a place on Comcast.s vast national stage. That alone gives Comcast a lot of influence. But Comcast wants a piece of the action, too -- the ability to own the programming it once merely delivered. "Comcast wants to leverage its control of the pipes to gain control over the content," said Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a media-watchdog group critical of Comcast's increasing power.

But the same statement could be taken as a compliment, had it come from a Wall Street analyst. "Comcast ought to own content," said Michael A. Kupinski, a cable and telecommunications analyst at A.G. Edwards & Sons in St. Louis. "Content drives demand."

Comcast today owns 84 percent of Hirschhorn.s G4 network, which claims to attract a higher concentration of 18- to 34-year-old males -- a group advertisers love -- than even ESPN. It also owns 61 percent of E! Entertainment and its sister network, the Style Channel. It owns 100 percent of the Golf Channel, the Outdoor Life Network and AZN, a network recently refocused on an Asian American audience. Five regional sports networks, including Comcast SportsNet in the Philadelphia area, also are owned or controlled by Comcast.

Together, Comcast's channels generated $787 million in revenue for the company in 2004 -- less than 4 percent of the company's overall revenue.

In addition to networks, Comcast owns movies and TV shows -- thousands of
them -- thanks to a partnership it formed with Sony last year to purchase the MGM film and video library. In June, Comcast named an executive to create new channels to highlight that library. But with all those channels and all those cable subscribers, critics such as Scott see an unfair advantage -- and peril for the marketplace of ideas.

The Federal Communications Commission, which is already reviewing Comcast's deal with Time Warner Inc. to buy the bankrupt Adelphia Communications Corp., has also promised to review its media-ownership laws. Comcast could come under scrutiny in that proceeding, too.

"When Time Warner and Comcast get behind a channel, it has a 100 percent chance of succeeding," said Doron Gorshein, who is trying to launch an independent cable channel. "If Comcast and Time Warner don.t get behind a channel, it has almost zero chance of succeeding." Gorshein said his America Channel, which aims to feature independently produced documentaries about life in the United States, is among those that have been rejected by Comcast and Time Warner.

Together, the two cable operators serve about half of all households that receive cable or satellite TV. And their reach will grow if their proposed purchase of Adelphia is approved. Gorshein has filed a statement with the FCC opposing the deal. "I do not believe that a small group of four or five companies ought to have domain over creativity in America," he said.

The marketplace has more influence over creativity than Comcast, responded David L. Cohen, a Comcast executive vice president who once served as chief of staff to former Mayor Ed Rendell.

"It's about content," Cohen said. "It's about putting on programs that people want to see." He offered a litany of programming -- enabled by cable -- 24/7 news, C-Span, ethnic programming. "Comcast is the largest distributor of cable TV, but but none of the networks in which it is invested are among the 20 highest-rated," Cohen said.

Yet most of those top cable networks are owned by a handful of media companies, including Disney, Time Warner Inc., Viacom Inc., and Vivendi Universal S.A., a French company that owns the NBC network. Critics also worry that Comcast -- and other cable companies that own cable channels -- will try to keep those channels off satellite systems and TV systems promised by phone companies in the coming years.

DirecTV has accused Comcast and several of its cable partners of doing just that. In a complaint to the FCC, DirecTV says fees charged to satellite systems to carry the iN Demand High Definition movie network are higher than those charged to cable firms. iN Demand is owned by Comcast, Time Warner and Charter Communications Inc.

In response to the complaint, iN Demand issued a statement saying that its "pricing policies are in full compliance with FCC rules and regulations" and that it is "confident that the FCC will find in our favor."

Burke said Comcast is interested in delivering the best cable channels to its subscribers, without regard to whether it has a stake in the channel. And, he said, it is to Comcast's advantage to get its networks delivered to as many viewers as it can -- even viewers who subscribe to satellite TV.

Gorshein says he remains unconvinced. "Comcast has a strong disincentive to launch independent channels," he said. "The benefit to a cable operator from owning a channel far outweighs the incremental benefit it may get from simply carrying a channel owned by an independent company."

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# posted by newshare @ 7:41 AM 0 comments

NETWORK NEUTRALITY: After Brand X, advocacy groups making it a top priority

FROM: Technology Daily
http://www.njtelecomupdate.com/lenya/telco/live/tb-GSSV1119906704461.html
POSTED: June 27, 2005

After Court Ruling, Advocacy Groups

Focusing On 'Network Neutrality'

By David Hatch
Technology Daiily

Public advocacy groups are making "network neutrality" a top legislative priority after the Supreme Court handed them a defeat Monday -- and they could be boosted by support from Amazon.com, Microsoft and other corporations, sources said.

Those companies, along with other members of the Coalition of Broadband Users and Innovators -- such as Yahoo and eBay -- want to safeguard customer access to their new and existing high-speed Internet services. But opposition from the cable industry is expected to be fierce.

Meanwhile, Senate Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska and Commerce ranking member Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, vowed late Monday to review the impact of the court's ruling in the so-called Brand X case on public-interest obligations -- including contributions to the $6.5 billion Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes telecom service in rural and impoverished areas. Both lawmakers are strong proponents of the fund, and Stevens plans to introduce a universal service reform bill in an effort to strengthen the program.

One source, speaking on background, suggested that the high court's classification of cable-delivered high speed Internet as an "information service" means the technology also would not be subject to public interest requirements governing 911 emergency service, consumer privacy, law enforcement wiretapping, and communications access for the disabled.

"[A committee review] will permit us to consider what steps may be necessary from the Congress or the Federal Communications Commission to ensure that our communications laws preserve competition and protect the interests of consumers," Stevens and Inouye wrote.

Network neutrality would bar cable companies from blocking or degrading competing telecommunications, media or commercial services offered over broadband pipes. The restrictions likely would extend to phone providers of high-speed Internet. The high court ruled Monday that broadband over cable modems should not be subject to "common carrier" rules requiring the sharing of networks with competitors.

"Network neutrality is no such thing," Kyle McSlarrow, president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, responded during a Monday press briefing. His industry has a business incentive to preserve the rights of cable-modem customers to go anywhere online, he said, and network neutrality would create a solution for a non-existent problem.

Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the House Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee, will champion the neutrality cause by seeking to add anti-discriminatory protections to telecom legislation being drafted by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a source said.

"My goal will be to ensure that national broadband policy reflects the open architecture model of the Internet and remains a medium friendly to innovation," Markey said in a statement. "Congress intended that cable broadband services should be treated with the same openness and access that consumers and Internet providers enjoy today over telephone lines," he added, while declaring, "Unfortunately, today's ruling is both anti-consumer and anti-competition."

But House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas, may not be receptive to Markey's goals. "I commend the court for upholding the FCC's deregulatory approach to broadband services," Barton said in a statement, adding that the "FCC correctly determined that broadband services should not be regulated as common carriage."

Said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., chairman of the Senate Commerce Technology Subcommittee, "It is my hope that Congress can build on the Supreme Court's decision today on Brand X by updating our nation's communications laws" and removing barriers to innovation.

SSen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a Commerce Committee member, wants the FCC to protect independent players on the Internet and is willing to consider a legislative fix, a source said. But the source suggested that the court's decision could be moot in a few years -- because the telecom legislation envisioned by lawmakers would kill the regulatory framework that classifies technologies as "information" or "telecommunications" services.

"I think it's an uphill battle," Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said of the chances of finding support for network neutrality among influential GOP lawmakers. Nevertheless, he said the court's ruling in National Cable and Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet, would galvanize cable industry critics. "There will be a growing call on the part of the civil-liberties community and the Internet community to reverse this decision," he said.

Gigi Sohn, president of the watchdog group Public Knowledge, said anti-discriminatory safeguards could be outlined in a few sentences. But a congressional source suggested that provisions would be lengthier and more complicated. The FCC or another agency, Sohn said, should be charged with enforcing the requirements.

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# posted by newshare @ 7:35 AM 0 comments

NETWORK NEUTRALITY: Washington Post story details lobbying effort by "pipe" owners to restrict content on Internet

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/23/AR2005112302200.html
PUBLISHED: Thursday, November 24, 2005; D01

SEE ALSO:
http://newshare.blogspot.com/2005/07/technology-daily-brand-x-and-focusing.html

Another good source:
The link is to http://www.fepproject.org/commentaries/grokster&brandx.html

By Marjorie Marjorie Heins / Brennan Center for Justice / Free Expression
Policy Project / 212 992-8847 / marjorie.heins@nyu.edu / www.fepproject.org
BRIEF on subject: http://www.fepproject.org/courtbriefs/BrandX.pdf

Renewed Warning of Bandwidth Hoarding

By Jonathan Krim
The Washington Post
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

A couple of years ago, a group of big technology companies got together and issued a public alarm about the future of the Internet:

Those who own the wires that get us online, the companies said, should not be able to pick and choose what Web content and services we can see and
use.

Just as electric companies can't cut deals with electronics makers to allow only some products to work, the Internet should have similar, guaranteed "network neutrality," argued tech firms such as Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.

The telephone and cable companies that provide most Internet access dismissed the warning as a pro-regulatory, paranoid rant. It was a solution in search of a problem, they said, and they vowed they would never, ever do such a thing. And the issue receded.

But now it's back in a big way, and the question is: How will the tech industry respond?

Consider:

On March 3, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it settled a case against a small North Carolina-based telephone company that was blocking the ability of its customers to use voice-over-Internet calling services instead of regular phone lines.

On Sept. 15, the first major draft of proposed changes in the nation's telecommunication's laws was circulated by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The draft said Internet service providers must not "block, impair, interfere with the offering of, access to, or the use of such content, applications or services."

On Nov. 2, another draft of the bill came out, with language specifically addressing the Internet video services that are proliferating as connection speeds increase and the phone companies get into the digital television business. In this draft, the prohibition on blocking or impeding content was gone.

If the bill passes as is, tech companies say, the Internet could be forever compromised.

"Enshrining a rule that broadly permits network operators to discriminate in favor of certain kinds of services and to potentially interfere with others would place broadband operators in control of online activity," Vinton G. Cerf, a founding father of the Internet who now works for Google Inc., wrote in a letter to Congress.

The phone companies argue that with their new fiber-optic systems capable of handling huge amounts of bandwidth, they simply want the ability to set aside some of it for their own services, be it television, gaming or anything else.

Unfortunately for them, the head of phone giant SBC Communications Inc., Edward E. Whitacre Jr., was a little more plain-spoken in an interview in Business Week.

"Now what they [Google, Yahoo, MSN] would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it," Whitacre said. "So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using."

Like his predecessor, FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin favors network neutrality "principles," but not codifying them as rules.

The FCC did add them as conditions of planned mergers between SBC and AT&T Corp., and Verizon Communications Inc. and MCI Inc. But those conditions apply only for two years, and only to those companies, so Congress will have to wrestle with this beast.

A coalition of tech companies that includes Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Ebay Inc. and IAC/InterActive Corp., argues that the issue is bigger than straight-up discrimination. What if, they say, the Internet service providers decide to reserve 90 percent of their bandwidth for their own services, and leave 10 percent for the rest?

"Allowing broadband providers to segment their . . . offerings and reserve huge amounts of bandwidth for their own services will not give consumers the broadband Internet our country and economy need," Cerf wrote.

Another wrinkle: What if Internet service providers decide to provide lots of bandwidth to customers who buy their other services, such as cellular or voice-over-Internet telephony -- but less if the customer uses rival providers of those services? That would be similar to the kind of bundling that occurs now, under which, for example, cable Internet service is cheaper if a consumer also buys a cable-television package. That, they say, is the free market at work.

With tech firms and the Internet providers engaged in many joint business relationships, it is unclear how much artillery the technology group is willing to roll out on this issue.

If they hope to succeed against the powerful cable and telephone lobbies, it will require more than some letters and public testimony to Congress.

Jonathan Krim can be reached atkrimj@washpost.com.

# posted by newshare @ 7:02 AM 0 comments

FUTURE: Spokane daily's editor details efforts at "transparent newsroom" in Rosen blog post

On the weblog of New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, there's a guest piece by the editor of the Spokane Statesman-Review, a 107,000-circulation daily, about their extensive efforts at creating a "transparent newsroom." It's a detailed look at one newspaper's effort to change. Here's the link:
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/11/21/spk_ss.html

Here's a link to Spokane editor Steve Smith's account of "transparent newsroom" in the fall edition of Nieman Reports:
http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/05-3NRfall/V59N3.pdf

Read also a transcript of New York University professor Jay Rosen's appearance on a Washington Post-sponsored chat session about Bob Woodward:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2005/11/14/DI2005111400854.html

Smith also links to a 1999 American Society of Newspaper Editors' credibility report:
http://www.asne.org/kiosk/reports/99reports/1999examiningourcredibility/index.htm

Here is a Washington Post column on Spokane's transparent newsroom approach:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/15/AR2005111501162.html

# posted by newshare @ 6:46 AM 0 comments

Saturday, November 26, 2005

BLOGS/ADVERTISING: As Corporate Ad Money Flows Their Way, Bloggers Risk Their Rebel Reputation - New York Times (fwd)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/26/technology/26blog.html
November 26, 2005

As Corporate Ad Money Flows Their Way, Bloggers Risk Their Rebel Reputation

By LOUISE STORY
The New York Times

When Anita Campbell started her Web log about small-business trends two
years ago, she thought it would simply be a service for her clients and help
her consulting business grow.

Instead, she said, the blog "just took off," attracting more readers than
she had dreamed of. Then, companies offered to pay her to post
advertisements and product mentions on her site. There were enough offers,
she said, that she could choose to work with only the ones relevant to her
readers. And so, her blog, once just a marketing tool, became a money
generator on its own.

"I never try to hide the fact that I am writing about an advertiser," she
said in an e-mail statement. "But I also don't apologize for accepting
advertising, and I make it clear that just like everyone else I have to earn
a living and pay the expenses of keeping the site going."

After beginning as a vehicle for anti-establishment, noncommercial writers,
many Web logs have laid out welcome mats for corporate America in the last
couple of years. No one tracks how much advertising money is flowing to Web
logs. Nor is it clear how many bloggers, like Ms. Campbell, disclose their
sponsors. But when writers have not been completely open, their fellow
bloggers have been quick to criticize.

Businesses have noticed the growing readership and influence of these
Internet postings and are spending $50 million to $100 million this year on
blog advertising and marketing, said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester
Research, a company that looks at the impact of technology on business and
consumers. Recognizing that blogs have become more mainstream, companies are
paying for advertisements or mentions on blogs, courting blog writers with
public relations efforts and inviting writers to come blog on one of their
corporate sites.

The blogosphere, companies said, is an important place to have a presence,
and blog writers are not shying away from the attention.

"The attitude has completely changed from where it was two years ago and
even a year ago," said Jim Kukral, the publisher of ReveNews, a site about
making money from Web logs. "People have started to realize that, hey, this
is fun; we've proven it's fun; I enjoy doing it; now let's apply a few
advertising techniques and make some money."

There is now an annual Blog Business Summit and several books on how to make
money blogging.

Many blog writers have signed up for Google's AdSense program, which started
in 2003 and pays Web publishers based on how many times advertisements on
their sites receive clicks. Google places the ads on participating Web sites
using contextual word matching, in an attempt to ensure that the
advertisements relate to the content on the page.

Bloggers are also making money through "affiliate networks," which, in
contrast to Google's automated system, allow blog writers to choose which
advertisements to put on their pages. They also can be paid based on how
often ads on their sites lead to sales rather than how often the ads receive
clicks. Shareasale, Commission Junction and LinkShare are three such network
companies.

"You have all these self-publishers, people like the bloggers, who suddenly
become business partners with Fortune 500 companies," said Heidi S. Messer,
the president and chief operating officer of LinkShare, which connects Web
writers with companies like Dell, Wal-Mart and Apple Computer.

Sometimes blog writers make money by simply linking to companies' home
pages. Companies come up higher in Google, Yahoo and other search engines
when they are frequently linked to and mentioned on many sites, including
blogs.

USWeb, an online marketing firm, has run campaigns this year that pay people
$5 to mention a company or link to its site. Most of the companies USWeb
works with do not allow the company to identify them, said Ed Shull, the
chief executive of USWeb, but some that he can mention include Lussori.com,
a watch and jewelry company; Dot Flowers; and Terra Entertainment.

Currently, USWeb is asking people with personal profile pages on
myspaces.com, a social networking site, to include a trailer from Terra
Entertainment's coming release of the film "One Perfect Day" on their pages.
In exchange, these Web users will have their names listed on the end of the
credits on the film's DVD, Mr. Shull said.

USWeb has been criticized by some blog writers for not requiring its network
of about 5,000 blog writers to disclose payments. It is currently completing
guidelines on how bloggers should disclose that they were paid to mention
products, Mr. Shull said.

"We are still leaving this as an option to bloggers," he said in an e-mail
statement, "but we do recommend that they disclose to readers that
advertisers do support the site through paid mentions."

To be sure, most blog writers do not make any money, and those who do often
make only enough to pay their site fees. There are now at least 21.5 million
Web logs worldwide, according to Technorati, a company that tracks blog
postings. Many blogs remain primarily personal postings that Internet users
pursue purely because of their own interests.

Still, large numbers of online writers are interested in making money.

Large blog Web sites like Gawker Media and Weblogs have offered blog writers
another opportunity to cash in. These sites display their postings alongside
that of many other writers, increasing bloggers' abilities to attract
readers and advertisers.

So far, the idea seems to be working. Jason McCabe Calacanis, chief
executive of Weblogs, a site acquired by the America Online unit of Time
Warner this fall, said the site would generate a few million dollars this
year. Weblog's 140 bloggers are paid based on how often they write, he said.
A Forrester Research survey found in February that 64 percent of national
marketers are interested in advertising on blogs.

Audi, for example, paid for about 70 million ads about its A3 compact model
on 286 Web logs in the spring. Many of the blog ads featured links to other
blogs that mentioned Audi's campaign for the A3, not to Audi's site, said
Brian Clark, chief executive of GMD Studios, an experimental media firm that
worked with Audi's advertising agency to create the campaign.

"It was a substantial buy, and it was a really effective buy for the
campaign in terms of the response," Mr. Clark said. "You find that blogs are
these series of citational records of what bloggers read. People with blogs
read blogs. You get a feedback cycle."

Web logs also give advertisers the chance to aim at specific readers. If you
want to advertise to New York Mets fans, for example, you can easily find
blogs that cater to those readers, Mr. Clark said.

Last spring, Volvo spent several million dollars to sponsor Microsoft's MSN
Spaces, a site that offers free Web logs and personal pages. The blog
investment was worth it, said Anna Papadopoulos, the interactive media
director at Euro RSCG 4D, a division of Havas that is running Volvo's Web
log campaign. Since April, about five million pages have been set up by
individuals, and a million people have visited Volvo's home page directly
from the blog site, she said.

"These are people that we wouldn't have gotten through other marketing
efforts," Ms. Papadopoulos said.

SBC Communications, which adopted the AT&T name on Monday, has found that
advertisements on the blog site it started last fall, ProjectDU.com, have a
higher click-through rate to its home page than its advertisements have had
on other Web sites, said Michael Grasso, associate vice president for
consumer marketing at AT&T.

Companies are also starting Web logs on their sites written by their
employees. General Motors, for example, created two within the last year.
Blogs may eventually replace many of the company's news releases, said
Michael Wiley, director of new media for General Motors.

General Motors has also started to treat some Web log writers as it does
traditional journalists, and is deciding which bloggers to invite to media
showings of its new cars.

"It's very similar to media relations, but it's a little more grass roots,"
Mr. Wiley said. "The level of respect for certain influential bloggers is
certainly growing."

When Piaggio USA, the makers of Vespa scooters, decided to include a Web log
on its site, the company recruited Vespa customers who were already blogging
about scooters. The two Vespa blogs, which started posting last summer, do
not pay the writers and ask the writers not to sell later the material they
write for Vespa.

One Vespa writer, Neil Barton, said he was willing to blog on Vespa's site
free because of the visibility it would give his blogs, formerly published
only on his own site, UrbanNerd.com.

"I just thought, well you know, no one really knows about UrbanNerd, but a
lot of people know about Vespa, so it will be a cool way to get what I'm
writing out there," said Mr. Barton, who lives in New Jersey. "The only
limit I could see with Vespa is if I wanted to write about a competitor's
scooter. I probably would post it on my blog as opposed to Vespa's."

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# posted by newshare @ 7:33 AM 0 comments

ADVERTISING: Blogs become locations for new advertising

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/25/business/25adcol.html
Published: November 25, 2005

By STUART ELLIOTT
The New York Times

THE parade of mainstream advertisers starting to use nontraditional media is growing almost as long as that march through
Manhattan yesterday sponsored by a certain department store.

Joining the throng are the Budget Rent a Car unit of the Cendant Corporation and the toy maker Hasbro. Budget turned to
blogs to promote a contest with a scavenger hunt motif, buying advertisements on 177 blogs bearing names like
BuzzMachine, Gizmodo, Jossip, Largehearted Boy, Overheard in New York, Stereogum and The Superficial.

And beginning next week, Hasbro will sponsor an unconventional series of make-believe classified ads to promote a new
version of its Monopoly board game.

The classifieds will appear in newspapers read by consumers shopping for cars, houses and boats.

Although the ads will resemble those that sell cars, houses and boats, the "merchandise" is actually in the form of
tokens from the new Monopoly 70th anniversary edition.

The campaigns from Hasbro and Budget are a sign of the increasing appeal of nontraditional media to once-conservative
mainstay marketers as they seek to reach bombarded consumers. The growing willingness to consider alternatives to
television commercials, billboards and print ads is one of the most significant changes in marketing in decades.

"I've got to be smart and make my brand feel smart to the consumer," said Scott Deaver, executive vice president for
marketing at the Cendant Car Rental Group in Parsippany, N.J., which oversees Budget and Avis.

"I can't outspend Hertz," Mr. Deaver added, "but I can outsmart them."

What is most valuable about nontraditional media like blogs, Mr. Deaver said, is their ability to "actively engage the
consumer" compared with "passive TV spots" and other traditional choices.

That assessment was echoed by Mr. Deaver's counterpart at Hasbro.

"When you do something unusual, unexpected, with something so well known as Monopoly, you can get a lot of talk value,"
said Mark Blecher, senior vice president for marketing at the Hasbro Games division of Hasbro in Longmeadow, Mass.

"We're not going to shift all our money into this," Mr. Blecher said, "but using innovative advertising you can generate
some word of mouth for a fraction of the cost of a commercial on a major network TV show."

John Staffen, executive creative director of the Hasbro Games agency, the New York office of Arnold Worldwide, estimated
that the budget for the make-believe classified ads was "a couple of thousand dollars." That sum is buying space in
publications like Deals on Wheels and Yacht Trader, interspersed among the classifieds from actual sellers.

Reading those publications is "what middle America does to live out its dreams," said Mr. Staffen, whose agency is part
of the Arnold Worldwide Partners division of Havas. That matches the dream-big theme of Monopoly, he added, as symbolized
by its brand character, once known as Rich Uncle Penny Bags and now called Mr. Monopoly.

The Monopoly ads feature photographs of the tokens from the new game rather than real houses, boats or automobiles. They
are written in the typically terse prose of classifieds, the better to blend in with their prosaic surroundings.

The car-token ad reads: "1935 classic. Just upgraded. Low mileage. Mint cond. Chrome finish. Runs like a dream in
Monopoly 70th Anniversary Edition. The best Monopoly board game money can buy. Call 877-MONOP70 or go to
monopoly70th.com."

The blog campaign for Budget cost about $20,000, Mr. Deaver said. The ads appearing on the 177 blogs asked readers to
visit a blog sponsored by Budget (upyourbudget.com) and enter a treasure hunt being held for four weeks in 16 cities with
cash prizes of $160,000. The final contest, in San Diego, ended this week. "Blogs seemed an appropriate fit for Budget's
young, tech-savvy audience," said Jay Arnold, president and chief executive at the Impax Marketing Group in Philadelphia,
which created the blog campaign for Budget.

"And fortunately, some of the people who won the contests were Budget users," Mr. Arnold added, laughing. The Budget ads
were simple, presenting cartoon characters urging blog readers to visit the Budget blog and enter the contests.

The blogs were selected, Mr. Arnold said, with the help of a consultant, B. L. Ochman, using criteria like how frequently
they are updated and how interesting they are to the so-called technorati. In fact, Mr. Arnold said, the tracking service
technorati.com was used to help pick the blogs.

Among some of the other blogs on which the ads appeared were Blurbomat, BoingBoing, CityRag, Coolfer, Daily Heights,
DCist, Gothamist, IndieWire and This Is Broken.

As online diaries, most blogs are by their nature candid and uncensored. As a result, "you don't have the same kind of
control of or ability to know the content as with mainstream advertising," Mr. Arnold said, adding: "There's no question
about the fact it's a little riskier. We want to push the envelope, but not be inappropriate."

The blogs were screened to cull those with content like "naked body parts," Mr. Arnold said, adding that he and Mr.
Deaver received no complaints during the month the campaign ran.

Mr. Deaver said he was pleased enough with the results of the campaign to have decided "we'll certainly be back in this
space." (The Budget blog tells readers the next contest will be "sometime in spring 2006.")

Even so, "the jury's still out on the metrics," Mr. Deaver said. "I'd be lying if I said I know what to measure to
determine success."

By a preliminary count, Mr. Deaver said, the blog pages on which the Budget ads appeared had 19.9 million impressions,
which generated about 60,000 click-throughs to the Budget blog. That accounted for about half the total traffic to the
Budget blog, he added.

"I'm happy about those numbers," Mr. Deaver said, "but the real determination is, what do we learn? Are we smarter when
we do it next time?"
----------------------------------------------------------------

# posted by newshare @ 7:09 AM 0 comments

Friday, November 25, 2005

BLOGS: FEC finds a blog covering public policy is not subject to regulation

Reposted from SPJ Pressnotes, Nov. 23, 2005
http://www.spj.org/pressNotes.asp?ref=13029

ORIGINAL SOURCE:
Kaitlin Thaney, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
http://www.rcfp.org/news/2005/1122-prr-fecsay.html

FEC says political blog exempt from campaign law

The Federal Election Commission recognized the partisan blog Fired Up! as
a press entity that is allowed, like journalists, to cover and comment on
political candidates without their positive comments being counted as
campaign expenditures. The FEC unanimously approved Advisory Opinion
2005-16 Thursday in response to a request from the blog's organizers
concerning the application of the finance rules to sites owned and
operated by Fired Up! The five-member commission adopted the proposed
draft opinion without revision. Fired Up! consists of three state-specific
blogs for Maryland, Missouri and Washington, and one covering national
issues, each comprising a mix of editorial postings, quotes and commentary
from other news sources, and links to various articles or other blogs. The
FEC opinion is based on a long-standing two-part test. To qualify for the
exemption under the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, the FEC
considers whether the press entity is owned or controlled by a political
party, committee or candidate and examines the intentions behind the
organization's actions to determine if it is performing "legitimate press
functions." Despite its political slant and progressive content, Fired Up!
met both qualifications, the FEC found. Because "Fired Up! is a press
entity, and neither it nor its Web sites are owned or controlled by any
political party, political committee, or candidate, the costs Fired Up
incurs in covering or carrying a news story, commentary, or editorial on
its Web sites are exempt from the definitions of 'contribution' and
'expenditure.' "

--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Bill Densmore DENSMORE ASSOCIATES |
| 75 Water St. / P.O. Box 367 densmore@newshare.com |
| Williamstown MA 01267 USA http://www.newshare.com/ |
| VOICE: 413-458-8001 FAX: 413-458-8009 |
| media / marketing / management consulting |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

# posted by newshare @ 8:21 AM 0 comments

Thursday, November 24, 2005

GOVERNANCE: Knight-Ridder "alumni" seek board slate

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001524631

Knight Ridder Alumni, in Open Letter, Take Stand for 'Excellent
Journalism,' Say They Will Name Candidates for Board

By E&P Staff

Published: November 18, 2005 11:30 AM ET

NEW YORK In an extraordinary "Open Letter from Knight Ridder Alumni"
circulated to the media this morning, a long list of journalists declared,
"We have watched mostly in silent dismay as short-term profit demands have
diminished long-term capacity of newsrooms in Knight Ridder and other
public media companies. We are silent no more. We will support and counsel
only corporate leadership that restores to Knight Ridder newspapers the
resources to do excellent journalism. We are prepared collectively to
nominate candidates for the Knight Ridder board. We wish to reassert John
Knight.s creed."

The signers include such well-known figures as Doug Clifton, Gene Roberts,
Buzz Bissinger, Mark Bowden, Philip Meyer, David Lawrence Jr., and Bill
Marimow, among many others. The letter was mailed to the media by Jim
Naughton, former editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and former president
of The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

Naughton told E&P today he had organized the effort just this week and
they hoped to nominate a "slate" of candidates for the Knight Ridder board
that would include journalists at the next annual meeting. The company is
currently the focus of an investor-led move to pressure a sale or break-up
of the company, or other moves.

The full text and signers follow:

John S. Knight, a founder of the company known today as Knight Ridder,
believed -- and proved -- that excellent journalism is good business. The
undersigned, all alumni of Knight Ridder, have lived that creed.

As did the late Jack Knight, we believe profit is not merely nice but
necessary. Knight Ridder routinely has generated double-digit operating
profits -- such as last year's 19.4%. We understand the obligation of an
institutional investor to maximize return on investment. An investor for
whom double digits are insufficient is free to sell Knight Ridder stock.
An investor who instead demands the sale or dismantling of Knight Ridder
merely in the name of a larger profit margin is engaged not in good
business but in greed.

As did Jack Knight, we speak out of confidence in, not fear of, the future
of the good business of excellent journalism. There is durable value in
businesses that treat their citizens, their communities and their
employees with respect. New technology is an ally of, not a threat to,
trustworthy and nimble media. Competition gives rise to innovation and
efficiency, much as recent declines in print circulation have been
accompanied by increased electronic readership.

Knight Ridder is not merely another public company. It is a public trust.
It must balance corporate profitability with civic purpose. We oppose
those who would cripple the purpose by coercing more profit. We abhor
those for whom good business is insufficient and excellent journalism is
irrelevant.

We have watched mostly in silent dismay as short-term profit demands have
diminished long-term capacity of newsrooms in Knight Ridder and other
public media companies. We are silent no more. We will support and counsel
only corporate leadership that restores to Knight Ridder newspapers the
resources to do excellent journalism. We are prepared collectively to
nominate candidates for the Knight Ridder board. We wish to reassert John
Knight's creed.

Signed by:

Dale Allen, retired editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, former associate
managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, former editor/reporter at
The Charlotte Observer.

Rich Aregood, retired editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Daily News
and recipient of a Pulitzer Prize.

Marv Berenblum, former Senior Vice President for Human Resources of Knight
Ridder and current Chairman and CEO of the National Executive Service
Corps.

Buzz Bissinger, Philadephia Inquirer reporter (1981-88) and recipient of a
Pulitzer Prize, author.

Mike Blackman, Philip G. Warner Endowed Chair in Journalism at Sam Houston
State University and formerly editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and
foreign editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Ken Bookman, former Philadelphia Inquirer editor.

Mark Bowden, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, author of 'Black Hawk Down"
and many other books.

Lorraine E. Branham, Director, University of Texas School of Journalism,
and former editor of the Tallahassee Democrat.

Doug Clifton, former Executive Editor of the Miami Herald and current
Editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Gary Cohn, reporter for the Los Angeles Times, formerly a reporter for the
Lexington Herald Leader, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Baltimore Sun
and recipient of a Pulitzer Prize.

David B. Cooper, retired Associate Editor, Akron Beacon Journal.

J. Lowe Davis,, formerly an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The
Biloxi Sun Herald, both Knight Ridder newspapers, and currently Executive
Editor and CEO of The Virgin Islands Daily News, which is independently
owned.

Gary Farrugia, Editor & Publisher, The Day of New London, Ct. Formerly
Vice President of New Business Development for Philadelphia Newspapers and
an 18-year Knight Ridder employee.

Albert E. Fitzpatrick, Retired Assistant Vice President for Minority
Affairs of Knight Ridder and former Executive Editor of the Akron Beacon
Journal.

Gene Foreman, retired editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and currently a
professor of journalism.

Gilbert Gaul, former reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer and recipient
of two Pulitzer Prizes.

Michael A. Graham, former reporter for the Detroit Free Press.

Joe Grimm, recruiting and development editor, Detroit Free Press.

Edwin O. Guthman, senior lecturer in journalism, University of Southern
California, former Editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and recipient of a
Pulitzer Prize.

Glenn Guzzo, former Editor of The Denver Post and a Knight Ridder editor
for 18 years.

Carol Horner, Director, Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, and
former reporter, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1979-94

Bob Ingle, former executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News; former
Knight Ridder vice president/new media; former president, Knight Ridder
Ventures.

Marvin Katz, former reporter at the Akron Beacon Journal (1960-67).

George Kennedy, Miami Herald 1967-74, now Professor of Journalism,
University of Missouri.

Maxwell King, former Editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and current
president of The Heinz Endowments.

Ann Kolson, former Philadelphia Inquirer and current New York Times
editor.

Thomas Kunkel, Dean, Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the
University of Maryland ,and former Executive Editor, Columbus
Ledger-Enquirer.

David Lawrence Jr., Retired publisher of the Miami Herald, now president
of The Early Childhood Initiative Foundation.

Jan Leach, former editor of the Akron Beacon Journal; current Professional
in Residence, Kent State University School of Journalism and Mass
Communication.

Simon K.C. Li, formerly an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, now
assistant managing editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Steve Lopez, columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

Pam Luecke, Reynolds Professor of Business Journalism, Washington and Lee
University, former Editor and Senior Vice President, Lexington
Herald-Leader.

Janet Mandelstam, former Associate Managing Editor of The Philadelphia
Inquirer.

C.S. Manegold, James M. Cox, Jr. Professor of Journalism, Emory University
and visiting professor, NYU; former reporter for The New York Times, The
Philadelphia Inquirer and Newsweek Magazine. Part of the New York Times
team awarded a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1993 bombing of the
World Trade Center.

Bill Marimow, reporter and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer (1972-1993)
and Knight-Ridder stockholder and recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes.

Jim McCartney, Knight-Ridder Washington correspondent and columnist,
retired.

Molly Sinclair McCartney, Miami Herald reporter 1969-79, Washington Post
reporter, 1979-1993.

David A. Meeker, adjunct professor of journalism at Kent State School of
Journalism and Mass Communication, former reporter at the Akron Beacon
Journal and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, recipient of the John S. Knight
Award for Community Service from the Buckeye Chapter of the Society of
Professional Journalists.

Philip Meyer, former Knight Ridder director of news and circulation
research, current Knight Chair in Journalism, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, and author of "The Vanishing Newspaper."

Fen Montaigne, freelance journalist and former reporter at The
Philadelphia Inquirer.

Paul Moore, Public Editor of the Baltimore Sun and a former Assistant
Managing Editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Arlene Morgan, former Assistant Managing Editor of The Philadelphia
Inquirer and now Associate Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School
of Journalism.

Norman Morrison, formerly Vice President/Technology, Knight-Ridder
Newspapers, and Executive Vice President, Viewtron, KRN subsidiary.

James M. Naughton, retired editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and retired
president of The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

Brian Richardson, Head, Department of Journalism and Mass Communications,
Washington and Lee University, and
former reporter and editor at the Tallahassee Democrat,
Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Gene Roberts, retired executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and
retired managing editor of The New York Times, now professor of journalism
at the University of Maryland.

Doug Robinson, retired editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

John Russial, Associate Professor, University of Oregon School of
Journalism and Communication, and former Sunday copy chief of The
Philadelphia Inquirer.

Stephen Seplow, former news editor of Knight Ridder's Washington Bureau
and former metropolitan editor of the The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Neal Shine, retired copy boy, reporter, Managing Editor, columnist and
Publisher, Detroit Free Press.

Timothy D. Smith, former Managing Editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, now
Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Kent State
University

William Vance, Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, retired.

Debbie Van Tassel, KRI shareholder and Assistant Managing
Editor/Administration, The Plain Dealer.

Lois Sutherland Wark, Knight Ridder stockholder and retired editor at the
Detroit Free Press and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Thomas E. Wark, retired journalist.

Pete Weitzel, former Managing Editor, Miami Herald, and now Coordinator,
Coalition of Journalists for Open Government.

Mike Wendland, technology columnist for the Detroit Free Press and
Internet correspondent for NBC-TV Newschannel affiliates.

Ray White, public information director of Heifer International and a
former assistant news editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Abe Zaidan, retired senior editor of the Akron Beacon Journal.

David Zucchino, correspondent, the Los Angeles Times and former foreign
correspondent of The Philadelphia Inquirer and recipient of a Pulitzer
Prize.

# posted by newshare @ 9:00 PM 0 comments

Craigslist founder says he's helping news recommendation service

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/24/BUG2NFT6GR1.DTL
Posted Thursday, November 24, 2005

By Dan Fost
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

Craig Newmark says newspapers "are afraid to talk truth."...

Craig Newmark, the San Francisco engineer who created the popular Craigslist
Internet site, is getting involved in the news game.

Newmark, whose free Web site listings have wreaked havoc with the newspaper
business model over the past few years, acknowledged Wednesday that he is
working with other people on a new media venture involving "technologies
that promise to help people find the most trusted versions of the more
important stories."

Newmark, who was en route from England Wednesday, wrote in his blog, or
online journal, that the initiative is "not associated with Craigslist, just
me, trying to help." In a subsequent call to The Chronicle, Newmark said,
"There is confusion about this thing being my effort, whereas I'm just a
minor contributor to a second effort."

The British newspaper the Guardian, writing about a speech Newmark gave at a
conference in Oxford, characterized his plans as a major online journalism
project that would launch in three months.

The newspaper said Newmark criticized conventional U.S. media and opined
that a more decentralized "wisdom of crowds" approach might work better.

"The big issue in the U.S. is that newspapers are afraid to talk truth to
power. The White House press corps don't speak the truth to power -- they
are frightened to lose access they don't have anyway."

Newmark, who started Craigslist in his apartment in 1994 and has seen it
grow to a worldwide audience, said recent developments, such as journalists
coming under fire for controversial leaks in the Valerie Wilson case, are
eroding readers' trust.

"The American public has lost a lot of trust in conventional newspaper
mechanisms. Mechanisms are now being developed online to correct that," he
said, according to the Guardian.

Yet Newmark, whose site was blamed in one study for siphoning $50 million in
ads from Bay Area newspapers, struck a more conciliatory note on his blog,
at www.cnewmark.com.

"This kind of technology is intended to preserve the best of existing
journalistic practices and should help retain newsroom jobs," he wrote.
"It's intended to complement, preserve and grow existing media."

It was unclear from his comments if his site would resemble a news
aggregator, like the Google News feature that searches online news sites, or
if it would be more of a so-called "citizen journalism" initiative, in which
ordinary people offer their own reportage outside the strictures of
conventional newsrooms.

E-mail Dan Fost at dfost@sfchronicle.com.

----------------------------------------------------------------

# posted by newshare @ 6:52 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

CONCEPT: Comparing today's blog-driven media to America's colonial press

Prof. Norm Sims, of the journalism faculty at UMass-Amherst, offers this
observation:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 12:26:48 -0500
From: Norman Sims <sims@journ.umass.edu>
To: <mediagiraffe@journ.umass.edu>
Subject: Re: UPDATE: Craig Newman still talking about journalism

Bill,

Verrryy interesting. I'm increasingly comparing these developments to the rise
of the press in colonial America. There are several parallels. In colonial
America and the early Republic, there were many newspapers, a multitude of
voices in the marketplace, often representing differing political or mercantile
perspectives. Want ads started to form an economic foundation before display
ads were really available under the printing technologies of the time. Content
was dominated by community interests in such things as arriving cargoes, news
that was not common knowledge in the community (such as the latest happenings
from London), and a variety of entertaining and enlightening stuff such as
literature and poems. They tended to NOT carry local news, which everyone knew,
and that runs counter to the current media changes. Subscriptions weren't
free, but the newspapers were often posted in taverns and coffee houses, where
people would often read them aloud for the benefit of community members who
couldn't subscribe or who couldn't read. Very democratic in their purpose and
focus, and if you think about the shaping of the First Amendment in that
environment, you can see how I believe the new MGP environment is in keeping
with the traditions of American history.

Norm

On Nov 23, 2005, at 6:58 AM, Bill Densmore wrote:
>
> ONLINE MEDIA
> Craigslist founder launching online journalism project
>
> Craig Newmark has already revolutionised classified advertising in the US
> with his hugely successful website, craigslist.com. Now he is planning to
> shake up journalism, which he says has "lost the trust" of the public. The
> founder of the free classifieds site - the seventh most popular website in
> the US in terms of page views - is to launch a major online journalism
> project within three months that will copy his "wisdom of the masses"
> approach to advertising and apply it to journalism. "Things do need to
> change," Mr Newmark said. "The big issue in the US is that newspapers are
> afraid to talk truth to power. The White House press corps don't speak the
> truth to power - they are frightened to lose access they don't have anyway."
> ... He said that newspapers, which originally provided a local service to its
> readers, had lost their trust. "The American public has lost a lot of trust
> in conventional newspaper mechanisms. Mechanisms are now being developed
> online to correct that." Mr Newmark would not reveal any specific projects,
> which will run separately from Craigslist, but implied that they would
> involve using web technology to let readers decide what the major news
> stories would be. "We have seen a genuine wisdom-of-crowds effect at work at
> times on our website," he said.
>
> Source: Stephen Brook, The Guardian
> http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,7496,1647681,00.html
>

# posted by newshare @ 12:46 PM 0 comments

TECHNOLOGY: Google donates $3 million to "American Memory" digitized Library of Congress materials

http://wwwnl.technologyreview.com/t?ctl=FE2A41:2ED7CC0
Tuesday, November 22, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) _ Google Inc. is giving $3 million (euro2.54 million)
to the U.S. Library of Congress to help set up a system for creating
digital copies of rare documents from around the world _ the latest step
in Google's crusade to expand the amount of information that can be
indexed by its Internet-leading search engine.

With the donation announced Tuesday, Google becomes the first business to
back the ''World Digital Library,'' a concept that began to take shape
about five months ago.

The worldwide program is loosely modeled after the Library of Congress'
American Memory project launched 11 years ago.

Backed with $48 million (euro40.64 million) in private donations and a $15
million (euro12.7 million) infusion from the federal government, the
American Memory site at http://loc.gov/memory now has more than 10 million
items, including early maps of the United States as well as photos and
letters from the Civil War.

Librarian of Congress James Billington now wants to create similar sites
devoted to other cultures outside the United States and Europe.

Although nothing has been finalized, Billington initially envisions
devoting large sections of the World Digital Library to material from
China, India and Islam.

''Much of this will be one-of-a-kind material that you won't be able to
find anywhere else,'' Billington said during a Monday interview. ''Getting
the material out there (online) is really important. ''We have already
preserved a lot of material that might have perished in other hands.''

Google co-founder Sergey Brin characterized the donation as no-brainer for
his Mountain View, California-based company as it pursues its avowed
mission ''to organize the world's information and make it universally
accessible and useful.''

''This is a philanthropic initiative for us,'' Brin said during a Monday
interview. ''It's all about making more information available to more
people.''

# posted by newshare @ 7:39 AM 0 comments

NEWSPAPERS: Editor lists 10 reasons why they'll survive

The editor of the Modesto, Calif., Bee daily, lists 10 reasons why he
thinks newspapers will survive the marketplace turmoil that is chilling
advertising revenues and raising uncertainty about what will pay for
journalism.

Source: Mark Vasche, The Modesto Bee, mvasche@modbee.com, 578-2356
http://www.modbee.com/opinion/story/11504168p-12241650c.html
Mark Vasché, The Bee's editor and senior vice president, may be reached at

10. Newspapers have been around for 400 years. And, for about 399 years,
give or take a few months, people have been predicting their demise. In my
lifetime alone, radio was going to do newspapers in; then television; and
now the Internet.

9. While circulation has declined industrywide, newspapers remain by far
the dominant way people get news and information. The Bee's share of the
market dwarfs any local radio, TV or Web outlet.

8. Newspaper readership has slipped, but radio, TV and even the Internet
are struggling even more, because of fragmentation and other factors. How
many radio and TV stations and Web sites do you have to choose from?

7. People always have and always will need news and information that can
help them make decisions, large and small, in their daily lives. That's as
true now as ever. And no one is better equipped and experienced to do that
than the local news company.

6. A historical function of the press is what's called the "watchdog" role
. monitoring public officials and agencies, and making sure the public's
business is conducted in public. Arguably, that's needed now more than
ever. And, again, who is better equipped and experienced to do that than
the local news company?

5. Even with the challenges, newspapers in general are very successful and
profitable businesses, and will continue to be so . as long as they take
their public service function seriously, apply sound business practices
and adapt to changes in the demographic, lifestyle and economic landscape.
The best of the best . starting with the McClatchy Co. . know that good
journalism is good business.

4. Just as technology is reshaping how we get information, so it is
reshaping how news organizations gather, organize, present and deliver it.
Companies like The Bee are transitioning from being newspaper companies to
being news and information companies, using a variety of platforms to
deliver what people need and want.

3. While the print product is the core of The Modesto Bee business,
modbee.com already is the leading local Web site and is helping readership
and revenue to grow at an impressive rate. We're in the process of fully
integrating the printed Bee with modbee.com to provide continuous news and
information.

2. The newspaper of tomorrow most likely will be quite different from
today's Bee . in content and appearance . just as today's is a far cry
from The Bee I joined in 1970. In fact, tomorrow's paper may not be
"paper" at all, but a flexible, foldable, paper-thin material onto which
information is downloaded to appear and be read like a traditional paper.

1. Finally, new is not always better. We may have the world at our
fingertips, but there's something special, something personal about being
able to hold what you're reading in your hands. When you curl up with a
good book at the beach or in bed, there's a wonderfully personal and
physical connection between you and those words on the page. It's
something you just don't get with fingers on a keyboard.

# posted by newshare @ 7:30 AM 0 comments

BUSINESS MODEL: Non-profit newspaper starts in rural Minnesota

Source: The Associated Press via Editor & Publisher
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001525768

NEWSPAPERS
Residents get strong response to new, non-profit newspaper

While charges of U.S.-sanctioned torture and riots in Paris led newspapers
around the country during the second week of November, folks in Atwater
were reading about a $450 school levy hike and a friendly reminder about
winter street parking regulations. Small potatoes, maybe -- but a
refreshing change after a decade with no local newspaper. At a time when
the newspaper industry is struggling for relevance in a digital age, a
group of Atwater residents went in a different direction -- launching a
nonprofit newspaper staffed mostly with volunteers. "This past year has
been an act of faith," said Connie Feig, a nurse and the chairwoman of the
new paper's board of directors. "It's all come down to faith and belief in
the community, and what it will support." The Atwater Sunfish Gazette --
the name was picked in a contest -- published its first six-page edition
on Oct. 12, and has put out two biweekly issues since. It's mailed free to
the 1,100 residents of the 56209 zip code, bringing them the latest on a
proposed sewer line, a local FFA Organization award winner and the Atwater
Falcons football squad. The town's last paper, the Atwater Herald, folded
in the mid-'90s. The nearest daily, Willmar's West Central Tribune, is
about 15 miles west on Highway 12 in west-central Minnesota, but it only
covers the big stuff in this slowly declining farm town. "It was really
hard to get information about the school, about sports," said Laverne
Pickle, a retiree and 50-year resident.

--------------------------

# posted by newshare @ 7:20 AM 0 comments

FUTURE: Liberal blogger hiring two reporters for muckraking

Source: Josh Gerstein, The New York Sun
http://www.nysun.com/article/23381

As newspapers across America race to shrink the size of their news staffs,
a prominent liberal blogger is doing something virtually unheard of these
days: hiring new reporters. Over the weekend, the proprietor of
TalkingPointsMemo.com , Joshua Marshall, announced that he is seeking two
journalists to work for a new blog that will offer "wall-to-wall coverage
of corruption, self-dealing, and betrayals of the public trust in today's
Washington." In an interview, the blogger said he does not aspire to be an
Internet mogul, but simply seeks to fill a niche he sees in the
journalistic marketplace. "I'm never going to have the resources to
compete with the big papers," Mr. Marshall said. He said his new site will
be able to follow long simmering stories more consistently than mainstream
outlets do. "A scrappy blog can provide a different service. I think
there's a market out there for that," he said. Mr. Marshall, whose site
just marked its fifth anniversary, said he has spent the past six months
seeking to professionalize the sale of advertising. A standard
TalkingPointsMemo.com ad costs $500 a week through one ad-selling
consortium, BlogAds.com. A premium ad can cost up to four times as much.
"We've got a backlog of orders already for next year for the political
bloggers," the owner of BlogAds.com, Henry Copeland, said. "It's just
really clear these guys are moving from making good money to making great
money."

# posted by newshare @ 7:10 AM 0 comments

Monday, November 21, 2005

FUTURE/NEWSPAPERS: Is Google Base a mortal threat to newspaper classifieds?

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/business/21carr.html
PUBLISHED: November 21, 2005

Woodward? Google? A Plague Week

By DAVID CARR
The New York Times

LAST week's string of dismal headlines about the newspaper business
eventually began to resemble a multivehicle pileup on the freeway. There
was so much carnage it was difficult for even the most determined
rubbernecker to know where to look.

On Wednesday, Bob Woodward, the man who built his career on protecting a
single Watergate source, became impaled by his efforts to protect another.
Who would have thought that one of the journalists responsible for the
ubiquitous "gate" suffix denoting scandal would end up with it being
attached to his name?

On the same day, Walter Pincus, one of Mr. Woodward's colleagues at The
Washington Post, found himself held in contempt of court for his refusal
to identify his sources in a lawsuit brought by Wen Ho Lee, a scientist
who formerly worked at a government nuclear weapons lab.

And while other reporters may not face jail time or fines, their future
seemed grim as well. The Los Angeles Times announced cuts of 85 newsroom
employees, while The Chicago Tribune said it was cutting 100 jobs across
all departments. Earlier in the week, Knight Ridder got shoved onto the
auction block by investors who had tired of the company's dawdling share
value.

And the worst of it? Those were not the worst of it.

The scariest development for the newspaper industry was the announcement
(on that same Wednesday) that Google, the search engine company that wants
to be the wallpaper of the future, was going live with Google Base, a
user-generated database in which people can upload any old thing they feel
like. Could be a poem about their cat, or their aunt's recipe for cod
fritters with corn relish.

Or, more ominously for the newspaper industry, people could start
uploading advertisements to sell their '97 Toyota Corolla. Craigslist
kicked off the trend, giving readers a free alternative to the local
classified section. If Google Base accelerates the process, the
journalism-school debates over anonymous sourcing and declining audience
may end up seeming quaint.

Google Base reverses the polarity on the company's consumer model. Instead
of simply sending automated crawlers out across the Web in search of
relevant answers to search queries, Google has invited its huge
constituency of users to send and tag information that will be organized
and displayed in relevant categories, all of which sounds like a large toe
into the water of the classified advertising business, estimated to be
worth about $100 billion a year.

This could be a fine thing for consumers, but for newspapers, which owe
about a third of their revenues to classified advertising, it could be
more a spike to the heart than just another nail in the coffin.

LARGE national newspapers like USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The
New York Times have already absorbed a big hit as advertising categories
like travel and automobiles have moved online. According to estimates
cited by The Associated Press, newspaper advertising revenues will grow
less than 3 percent in the current year while online revenue, much of it
coming from search advertising, will jump by more than 25 percent.

Google Base could take a bigger toll on local and regional newspapers. So
far, those papers have managed to maintain their connection between their
readers and the goods and services in the same market. By allowing its
audience to customize content and post it for free (all the while selling
ads against the audience that information aggregates), Google could all
but wipe out the middle man, which could be your friendly neighborhood
daily paper.

"Many newspapers have had historic monopolies in their respective markets
when it comes to classified ads," said Christa Quarles, an analyst at
Thomas Weisel Partners, a merchant bank in San Francisco. "The local
papers have been fairly insulated from major attack, and this could be the
next big shoe to drop."

The growing competition will certainly be evident if and when Knight
Ridder, with its host of regional and local newspapers, goes up for sale.
Historically, newspapers are valued at 10 to 12 times earnings, which
theoretically would make the company worth as much as $9 billion dollars.
Given Knight Ridder's current market capitalization of $4.18 billion,
Bruce S. Sherman, who heads Private Capital Management and who owns 19
percent of the company, thinks it might be time to sell.

But how liquid are newspapers? Even though they deliver profit margins of
more than 20 percent on an industrywide average, they are viewed as bad
bets for the future and may not bring the dear premium they have in the
past.

Across the board, newspaper stocks are down approximately 20 percent, in
part because the industry, accustomed to cyclical change in its 400-year
history, is now confronted by secular change: audiences are moving online
and taking advertising dollars with them. And they aren't coming back.

Happily, newspapers have been there to great them with Web sites of their
own, but owning consumers online is not quite the same as dropping a
product they pay for on their doorstep. Those eyeballs are worth less, at
least so far, and will not support big local news staffs, let alone
far-flung bureaus.

John Morton, an analyst who has been watching the newspaper industry since
1971, had a hard time remembering a worse period for the business.

"It was a very discouraging week by any measure in a year that has been
discouraging as well," he said. He pointed out that the week before, the
Audit Bureau of Circulations announced that the combined circulation for
newspapers dropped 2.6 percent in the six months ending in September. If
that trend continues, dailies could lose as many as 2.5 million
subscribers next year.

A reader outside the newspaper business might be tempted to say, so what?
New technologies are, by their nature, disruptive and the benefits
generally accrue to consumers. Who can complain about reaching millions -
or perhaps the one person you really need, a buyer - through placing a
free ad?

But if you consider newspapers to be a social and civic good, then some
things are at risk. Google gives consumers e-mail, maps and, in some
locations, wireless service for free. But for Google's news aggregator to
function, somebody has to do the reporting, to make the calls, to ensure
that what we call news is more than a press release hung on the Web.

News robots can't meet with a secret source in an underground garage or
pull back the blankets on a third-rate burglary to reveal a conspiracy at
the highest reaches of government. Tactical and ethical blunders aside,
actual journalists come in handy on occasion.

"Up to this point, the deck chairs have been rearranged," said Jane E.
Kirtley, a professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota. "But
the technology companies have been hustling and innovating in search of ad
revenues. And all of the cutbacks in newspapers are bound to have an
impact on the free flow of information."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search
----------------------------------------------------------------

# posted by newshare @ 10:19 AM 0 comments

Sunday, November 20, 2005

SPEECH: Bill Moyers on the 50th anniversary of the Texas Observer newspapers: Close to truth, not power

Former PBS host, Newsday publisher and White House aide Bill Moyers' remarks prepared for the 50th anniversary of the muckracking Texas Observer newspaper in Austin, Texas, contains his lament that there is no similarly fearless practitioner of the First Amendment stirring up trouble in Washington, D.C. He says of his brief time as a radio newsman in Austin: "It took me a long time to catch up—to realize that what matters in journalism is not how close you are to power but how close you are to the truth." He says of Washington today: "We are seeing now the results of systemic and spectacular corruption and cronyism and the triumph of a social ideal—the “You get yours/I’ll get mine” mentality—that is diametrically opposed to the ethic of shared sacrifice and responsibility."

# posted by newshare @ 6:46 PM 0 comments

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Online Journalism Review: FLICKR, BuzzNet expand citizen journalism

FLICKR, BUZZNET EXPAND CITIZEN JOURNALISM (OJR)
Mark Glaser: Traditional journalists and newspaper sites tap into online photo communities to gather visual research and allow readers to contribute and interact. It's just the tip
of the iceberg.
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/051115glaser/

# posted by newshare @ 7:19 PM 0 comments

OWNERSHIP: In Oregon, a family-newspaper publisher talks about the past, and future

Steve Forrester, publisher of The Daily Astoria in coastal Oregon, talks about his family's generations of newspaper ownership, the pressure of public-company profits, circulation and a "Ready, fire, aim" approach to the Internet.

# posted by newshare @ 7:27 AM 0 comments

Thursday, November 17, 2005

FUTURE: What will people use "Google Base" for?

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Google's New Public Space

Google Base aims to make previously less accessible databases available to anyone.

By Associated Press

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- An ambitious new Google Inc. service lets anyone upload most anything to a publicly searchable database, potentially laying the groundwork for a foray by the Internet juggernaut into classified advertising.

The venture, Google Base, could lead to a vast expansion of its content and signal grander ambitions for the king of online search-related advertising. Google's stated mission is, after all, nothing less than organizing the world's information. Launched as a "beta test" early Wednesday, Google Base has the potential to make instantly available a vast sea of content including -- but not limited to -- recipes, job ads, photos, DNA sequences, real estate listings and individual standalone databases.

Normally, it takes Web "crawlers" days or weeks to scour the Web and feed Google's main search engine with updated information, but they usually can't penetrate content buried in databases. This tool will make locating anything that's been uploaded nearly instantaneous, provided it finds users willing to provide the content.

Submitters will also be able to describe what they uploaded with keywords -- making searches and filters easier and more reliable.

"This is all part of our efforts to make it really easy for anyone with information to make it accessible from Google," said Salar Kamangar, vice president of product management at Google. "We just felt like this piece was just missing
before." What's less clear is exactly what Google plans to do with what it amasses. The company said the primary purpose of Google Base's release, in what's being characterized as a "beta test", is to study and improve how the information is collected and categorized.

Kamangar said the company eventually wants to integrate the results with results from its main search engine, its local search site, which identifies results by geographical location, and its shopping comparison service, Froogle.com. As it stands, Google Base has no mechanism for transacting business, whether buying a car or applying for a job. But its patrons -- a job listings service, say -- will be able to provide links in whatever they upload to commercial sites.

If Google goes commercial with the new service, which is widely expected, it could pose a formidable threat not only to traditional classified businesses such as newspapers but also online sites like eBay and Craigslist. Speculation has been further fueled by a patent application for a service called Google Automat that helps would-be sellers generate advertising. The company also is known to be working on an online payment system. And last month, Web surfers stumbled on an early version of Google Base that invited people to list things like a used
car for sale and a party planning service.

# posted by newshare @ 10:20 AM 0 comments

NEWSPAPER FUTURES: Editors Weblog views implications of possible Knight Ridder sale

Write's John Burke at Editors Weblog: The speculative sale of American newspaper giant Knight Ridder, or break up thereof, does not only reflect years of newspaper circulation slides and huge profit margin demands by shareholders. More relevantly in today's new media world, it demonstrates the original carelessness of the newspaper industry in underestimating the effects the Internet would have as well as the difficulties newspapers currently face in racing to catch up.

# posted by newshare @ 10:15 AM 0 comments

AUDIO: PBS Newshour story about citizen journalism -- 11-16-05

The 'We Media' Phenomena
BROADCAST: Nov. 16, 2005

RealAudio: The Internet has spawned a new wave of journalists created not
by traditional newsrooms, but fueled by citizen participation and
interactive technologies. Special correspondent Terence Smith reports.

STREAMING FILE:
http://audio.pbs.org:8080/ramgen/newshour/expansion/2005/11/16/20051116_media28.rm?altplay=20051116_media28.rm

# posted by newshare @ 8:56 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Online Newshour (PBS): The "We Media" Phenomena -- Nov. 16, 2005

*******************************************
* MEDIA WATCH ALERT
* An E-mail Service of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
* and the Online NewsHour
*******************************************
November 16, 2005

* WE MEDIA REVOLUTION

The Internet has spawned a new wave of journalists created not by
traditional newsrooms, but fueled by citizen participation and interactive
technologies. Tonight, special correspondent Terence Smith reports on the "we
media"
phenomena and what it may mean for news consumers traditional journalists.
Visit _http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media_ (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media)

# posted by newshare @ 9:27 PM 0 comments

NEWSPAPERS: Web usage grows while print circulation drops

More Americans Get Their Newspaper at the Click of a Mouse

Readers might be deserting America's traditional newspapers in droves, but
they seem to be turning as quickly to the papers' online editions, which
have just posted an 11% rise in readership. One in four Web surfers
visited a newspaper site in October, says Nielsen/NetRatings.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051115/lf_afp/afplifestylemedia_051115211417

# posted by newshare @ 9:13 PM 0 comments

Google Base service goes live -- are classifieds a target?

Google's Google Base service went live late Tuesday, allowing people to post "all types of online and offline information and images" for free. Observers speculate that Google is targeting the online classifieds space, specifically eBay and Craigslist.

http://news.com.com/Google+Base+service+goes+live/2100-1024_3-5954797.html

# posted by newshare @ 8:55 PM 0 comments

BLOGS: What defines "citizen journalism" -- advertising?

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idCategory=34&idsub=127&id=2137

Citizen journalism
Does advertising on a blog make a blogger a citizen journalist ... or, does
AOL/Time Warner paying $24+million for WeblogsInc make the network citizen
journalism?

Monday, November 14, 2005

By Bene Diction

I looked at what defines citizen journalism (Publish or aggregate?) in an
article last May and noted that while the way we get our news is changing,
how news is made is not. That's an interesting factoid to remember, and is
partially reflected in a recent study on people still preferring to get
their news from traditional media.

Which then brings up the question: Does advertising on a blog make a blogger
a citizen journalist?

Or, does AOL/Time Warner paying $24+million for WeblogsInc make the network
citizen journalism? Event and product specific blogs don't pretend to be.

More specifically, is Pajama Media citizen journalism? Opinion and
commentary have their place, and drawing in advertising revenue and using
main stream news aggregators may draw marketers and bloggers willing to sign
away their content for three months. An editorial board does not make
journalism, it draws marketers to a cluster of blogs and readers so they can
target them with their ads. Revenue streams will come from advertisers,
there is no overhead for the network and each blogger signing a contract
makes a decision about how much money and time they can afford to give out
to gather reliable content.

If you look at comments under Jeff Jarvis post, I don't wear PJ's, you'll
see US partisan politics has already surfaced, and has since Pajama Media
announced it was forming. Blogs and bloggers network, whether it be through
blogrolls, aggregators, portals, webrings or actual networks. Human beings
are social creatures that are attracted to those of like mind. That doesn't
mean anyone writing online can't break news, it does mean that blogging
networks are not going to be replacing main stream media anytime soon.

Disseminating information does not make citizen journalism. A launch party
in New York City this week does not make citizen journalism, co-operation
between journalists and bloggers does not make citizen journalism, hype and
advertising money does not make citizen journalism.

So I ask, what does make citizen journalism?

Bene Diction is a journalist and well known evangelical blogger at Bene
Diction Blogs On, and focuses on reviews of popular websites and
technology, as well as serving as culture editor for Spero News.

The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have
specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available
in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First
Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S.
Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the
material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog
for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright
owner.

# posted by newshare @ 9:43 AM 0 comments

BLOG: "Pajama Media" preparing for Nov 16 launch and new name (fwd)

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idCategory=31&idsub=129&id=2136
POSTED: Monday, November 14, 2005

By Bene Diction
----------------------------------------------------
Bene Diction is a journalist and well known evangelical blogger at Bene
Diction Blogs On, and focuses on reviews of popular websites and
technology, as well as serving as culture editor for Spero News.
----------------------------------------------------

This week a new online venture billing itself as citizen journalism will be
launched with a splash party in New York City.

Pajamas Media is the brainchild of two US bloggers, novelist Roger L. Simon
and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, with the aim to "re-define
journalism in the 21st century" as they explained in an October 17th, 2005
press release.

"Pajamas Media, a new blogging venture designed to bring together top online
writers, journalists and commentators under a single umbrella, today
unveiled its editorial board as it prepares for its formal debut next
month." That announcement comes as Pajamas Media further realizes its vision
of coalescing the internets brightest minds and most compelling content into
a single source that will, in turn, complement and re-define journalism in
the 21st century. The company will detail its vision and strategy -- and
unveil its new name -- at an invitation-only New York City event slated for
mid-November."

Spero News contacted PM with regard to the organization's economic model.
Unfortunately, PM said "several of these questions refer to information that
won't be released publicly until the Nov. 16 launch in New York, where we
are unveiling our core plans and goals."

That said, PM did say that "readers can expect a one-stop easy access to the
best of the blogosphere. You might think of our new portal, (name, logo,
look all to be unveiled Nov. 16) as something akin to the TV Guide in the
sense that it is a way for the public -- who by and large don't know what
blogging is all about -- to easily enter the system and access content that
interests them."

"We'll have a Directory to blog sites that we have read and accepted into
the system, from tiny to huge ones, covering a large range of topics.
Bloggers will keep their own sites, and we will not interfere in any way
with their content. We have already vetted all of our blogs to make sure
they are high-quality, and will continue to do that as we add more and more
sites to our Directory," PM said in an email.

"We are keeping the entire project very organic to the existing blogosphere,
not drumming up writers to create previously non-existent "blogs." One of
our bloggers recently compared us to Cream, a ground-up band of real
musicians with authentic roots and a real reason for coming together, rather
than the Monkees, a top-down created band of strangers hired by promoters to
copy what was popular," PM said.

The response continued: We have plans designed, we hope, to drive more
traffic to the blog sites, using our portal to do this, but, sorry, the
details will not be unveiled until our launch in NYC next month ... We will
have some original content on the portal (again, not unlike TV Guide), which
I cannot unveil at this timel. What I would add: We hope, further down the
road during our second phase, to develop a news service of blogger content
that will originate from our project."

Pajama Media has been profiling it's editorial board/bloggers for it's
portal, as well as some of the bloggers it has signed up before it becomes
official this week.

Economic models of blogging

It is estimated there are over 50 million blogs now online. According to
Technorati 40 to 50 thousand blogs go online each day around the world.
According to Pew Internet and American Life Project 11% of US citizens have
read a blog.

Over the past few years, newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets have
seen a shift in revenue and in many cases an adversarial relationship has
developed with traditional media and bloggers.

Journalist/blogger Ken Layne spoke boldy to traditional media in 2001 when
he said, "We can fact check your ass." The most well-known example of blogs
squaring against media in the US is the incident of bloggers fact checking a
CBS 60 Minutes segment in what is now called Rathergate.

As platforms and blogs have increased, so has the interest in the money that
can be made and exchanged, with three economic streams emerging: citizens as
journalists, blogging as an alternative to mainstream media and
product-focused weblogs, and can be represented by Adverts, Networks and
Pajama Media.

Adverts

Google, Amazon and Adsense are services that provide advertisements for
companies and individuals to place on blogs. Revenue for the companies and
for the blogger is obtained by sharing revenue based on sales or through a
cost-per-click scheme. Most bloggers make about $10 a month.

Networks

Jason McCabe Calacanis recently made headlines when his two-year-old network
of blogs was sold to AOL/Time Warner for 24 million dollars. The Weblogs Inc
stable of over 100 blogs includes specialty blogs. An economic break down of
traffic to those blogs can be found here. As the weblog concept evolves, it
is becoming easier to evaluate what worth a blog network or content, and
traffic has to investors and advertisers.

Pajama Media

PM seems to be a model that is being formed to take on mainstream media with
content and en masse advertising. It remains to be seen over time whether
the network of contracted bloggers will be able to provide content or
commentary.

Australian Duncan Riley of The Blog Herald wrote the owners for a contract.
It appears the legalities are not binding outside the US. Bloggers wishing
to join agree to the following: "Pajamas is a California partnership in
formation. Once formed, Pajamas wishes to contract with [you], an individual
who lives in [your state, country] to do two things:"

The blogger chosing to join this venture agrees to work for PM for three
months. PM holds exclusive rights of a bloggers content.

Again, from The Blog Herald: "Pajamas will offer you "most favored nation"
status for advertising percentages and content sale percentages, implying
that the terms of their transactions will be equal to the highest
percentages given any other participant who is not an owner in Pajamas.
Pajamas intends to reach out to blogs in part by using bloggers as a sales
force. You have a blog network, and it makes more sense for us to pay you to
approach the bloggers in that neighborhood than it makes for us to hire some
sales person to find them and approach them. So well have an affiliate
program, which will allow you to bring in other bloggers and participate in
the revenue that they bring to us."

What this appears to be saying is that this new venture is looking for (and
has signed) high profile US bloggers with the hope they will bring in other
bloggers and their advertising. PM media will own the bloggers content, and
has the right to package and sell it as they please to other media. This is
a business model of dissemination of information and it appears the
advertising is sold en masse. We'll know more later this week.

A look at the pre-launch site of PM media indicates it has signed on about
70 right wing Republican pundit bloggers and is not unlike an aggregator. It
provides a news feed from some traditional sources, and it will not be clear
until PM says so, how the two streams (news feeds and blogger content) will
be integrated. Nor is it clear if the bloggers will provide orginal news or
just commentary. This initial 3 page contract was released in May 2005.

The secrecy issue has been a concern to those that watch revenue streams in
the blogosphere.

In an interview with Duncan Riley, Roger L. Simon said "some degree of
exclusivity is a must if you are trying to build an advertising network. It
makes simple common sense. The ad serving companies need to know we
represent a large number of bloggers with a view to future consistency.
Otherwise it just wont happen in a manner that will do what we all hope -
build a serious income stream for bloggers. Only a tiny few will prosper.
That said, we plan to spell out relationships in more detail soon, including
how we propose to share income. Google, as you may know, doesnt do that. But
to make those proposals we have to know about our own economics and to do
that we need to have some idea of our reach. We should be there soon." (The
full interview can be read here).

The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have
specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available
in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First
Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S.
Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the
material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog
for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright
owner.

# posted by newshare @ 9:42 AM 0 comments

ADVERTISING: NYTimes -- Web advertising gives small-town retailers new lease on life

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/business/businessspecial/16schneider.html
Published: November 16, 2005

By KEITH SCHNEIDER
The New York Times

MANITOWOC, Wis.

ALMOST every significant American economic era is apparent in this neat-as-a-pin city on the western shore of Lake
Michigan. Its agrarian heritage is reflected in the farms lying at the city's edge, and a beer-malting plant at the
center of town. The maritime and industrial eras are represented by a coal-fired ferry that crosses Lake Michigan, and
the steel cranes built here by the 103-year-old Manitowoc Company. The rust belt period, with its manufacturing-job
losses and downtown decline, is still felt in slow population growth, modest housing prices and shuttered plants.

In the newest era of this city's history, the Internet is propping up bricks and mortar downtown, acting as a mainstay
for the stores that have helped Manitowoc establish what development specialists call a "recreational" shopping
experience. Indeed, besides generating sales for giants like Amazon, the Internet is allowing small stores, here and
around the country, to develop the niche products that shield them against big-box retailers.

Beyond the revenue from online sales, Manitowoc's merchants say the biggest benefit of e-commerce is that it enables them
to turn over their inventory much more quickly, so owners can add more products and variety to their sales floors. That,
in turn, encourages more interest and customer traffic, diversifies the revenue stream and contributes to downtown street
life here and in other small cities.

A walking tour of Manitowoc, population 34,000, reveals several examples of the convergence of new technology.

At Eighth Street is the kitchen supply retailer Cooks Corner, which occupies a 20,000-square-foot store that was once a
Kresge's. The company, which is 11 years old, employs 35 people and stocks 15,000 gadgets and appliances; its Web site,
cookscorner.com, accounts for a third of the company's revenue. Of the 1,000 customers who visit the site each day,
roughly 200 place a digital order, said Peter Burback, the company's owner and founder with his wife, Cathy. The site has
also elevated Cooks Corner to regional and national attention.

Mr. Burback keeps a customer log of cash-register receipts totaling 170,000 people who visited the store last year.
"We're the No. 1 tourist draw in the city," he said.

Around the corner from Mr. Burback, on Ninth Street, is Healthy Chocolate Treats (healthychocolatetreats.com), a business
founded in April by Paul Stitt, a 65-year-old biochemist who turned another Manitowoc-based specialty food company,
Natural Ovens Bakery (naturalovens.com), into a $29 million-a-year business that gets 20 percent of its sales from
Internet orders. Healthy Chocolate Treats, which employs seven people and attracts 100 or so retail customers a day,
specializes in vitamin D-fortified candies. Its revenues have already reached nearly $40,000 a month, a third from orders
from the Internet, Mr. Stitt said.

Nearby on 10th Street, the Fitness Store (thefitnessstore.com), founded in 1993, sells an array of exercise and
cardiovascular equipment. John Brunner, the 44-year-old owner, says that his 2005 sales are expected to reach $2.5
million, twice as much as last year. "The Internet accounts for 75 percent of our sales now," he said. "I started the
company in 1993. We launched a Web site in 1995. I didn't know the Internet was going to be such a catalyst for growth
until 2000, when we developed an e-commerce site. We're making huge gains now."

To some extent, the Internet's influence on helping small businesses was anticipated. In 2002, the Small Business
Administration published a study finding that 61 percent of small companies managed a Web site, and 35 percent were
selling products online.

What was not as clear was how the Internet could contribute to so many downtown revivals. Hours north of Manitowoc, in
the rugged Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Marquette is also undergoing an economic transition from being a mining-based
city of heavy industrialization to a recreation and tourism economy centered on its access to Lake Superior.

One anchor of Marquette's revival is the Getz Department Store, a family-owned business that has been on Front Street
since the late 19th century and now earns roughly half its sales revenue by selling Carhartt and North Face clothing on
the Internet (getzs.com). The company's Web site has also helped to establish Getz's, as it is also known, as one of the
city's tourist destinations, along with the county courthouse a few blocks west, where scenes from the 1959 Jimmy Stewart
film "Anatomy of a Murder" were shot.

Many other examples exist. In upstate New York, downtown Ithaca is a hub of new retail activity and tourist trade
generated by Internet marketing and sales. "There's an upside and a downside of marketing on the Internet," said Gary
Ferguson, the executive director of the Ithaca Downtown Partnership, a business development group. "The floral business
has been changed dramatically by the Internet. More and more people are buying flowers online. We had a business called
Plantations that had been here for 30 years and had a hard time with the transition and didn't make it.

"On the other hand, we have three used-book stores, and they do half their business on the Internet," Mr. Ferguson said.

The Beeswax Candle Company in Lynchburg, Va., started three years ago as an Internet business with a store located on the
edge of downtown. Because of rising sales at beeswaxcandleco.com, the company moved into a larger space at the center of
town.

"The Internet has taken a small family-owned candle business and allowed us to compete on a national level while
contributing to the redevelopment of our downtown area in central Virginia," said Kathy Shaw, the founder.

Several merchants said that preparing for the transition and managing Internet marketing, sales and distribution was not
easy.

E-commerce requires a business to change its infrastructure in four ways: The first is understanding the computer
hardware and e-commerce software and managing vendors, servers and consultants. The second is applying the technology to
sales and marketing by designing the Web site's back-end ordering platforms for customers, while making the front-end
digital showplace clear, attractive, informative and navigable. The third phase is hiring a consultant or training staff
members or doing both to manage the site. The last is developing the capacity to quickly fill and ship orders, respond to
returns and replace inventory, most of which can also be done on the Internet.

Here in Manitowoc, small businesses are tapping into the online sales world primarily through pay-per-click advertising
offered by Google's Adwords and Yahoo's Overture. Both companies require e-commerce retailers to bid on keywords and
phrases to drive customers to Web sites. Mr. Brunner of the Fitness Store said he spent $6,000 a month on Google and
$2,000 a month on Yahoo. But he also gained $240,000 in revenue in August. "I expect to do more than that in November and
December," he said.

Still, Dennis Mingay, the general manager of Getz's, said the cost of Internet advertising can be a big concern. Getz's,
he said, is spending nearly $1 a click. "We're trying to master the marketing strategy to get that down so it's
affordable," Mr. Mingay said.

One way to do that is through e-mail. Getz's has a list of 20,000 e-mail addresses. Cooks Corner has 35,000 addresses,
which it taps for promotional newsletters. Mr. Burback said that e-mail marketing had been successful, accounting for 75
percent of the company's orders in the week or so after they are sent. E-mail, he added, has helped Cooks Corner contain
the cost of Internet advertising to $2,500 a month.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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# posted by newshare @ 9:34 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

BLOGS/BUSINESS: Arizon State professor says some blogs are making money

URL: http://www.asuwebdevil.com/issues/2005/11/15/news/694917

POSTED: Tuesday, November 15, 2005
at the Arizona State University student daily
Blogging for profit: Businesses turning to online journals for advertising dollars

By Beth Cochran

Blogs, short for Web logs, are becoming a source of revenue for large companies and Internet users.

Blogging -- once a medium for personal online journaling -- continues to edge its way into the business arena as mainstream moneymakers for large companies, advertisers and Internet users. Blogs, short for Web logs, range from political news to entertainment to diary entries, and now they're used as marketing tools and sources of income.

Andrew Chen, assistant professor of information systems at ASU, said blogs are generating more revenue for companies than they are on the personal level, but that could soon change. "There are some pro-bloggers," Chen said. "Those are the people who make money from blogging. They're spreading their interest across different revenue streams."

A recent report by Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that by the end of 2004, 32 million Americans were reading Web logs and more than 8 million were posting blogs. Chen said revenue can come from advertisements and company sponsorships, but to be profitable, the blog has to generate enough traffic.

One way to generate traffic is to learn how to get the blog displayed at the top of a search result, Chen said. "Blogs are very similar to Web sites," Chen said. "You can create certain keywords in your blog so search engines will find that blog."

Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at Pew Internet & American Life Project, said Internet users are using logs as a source of income, but she doesn't know whether the revenue is substantial. But according to the report, blogging hasn't reached its full potential yet -- only 38 percent of Internet users know what a blog is. "Since May of 2003, about 5 million people were doing it, now we have closer to 11 million," Lenhart said. "Blogging isn't going away."

Leslie-Jean Thornton, journalism and mass communication professor at ASU, said blogs are great marketing tools because the reader has to keep coming back to stay connected. "If you don't keep checking back, you miss out on the discussion," Thornton said. "That's an advertiser's dream." Thornton said she sees the potential for earning money through blogging and thinks blogs will continue to grow in popularity.

Trisha Cupero, a psychology sophomore, said she's been reading blogs since high school after hearing about them from friends. "I just read up on what other people are doing and their communities so you can catch up on news or chat with people from around the world," Cupero said.

Reach the reporter at beth.cochran@asu.edu .
Copyright © 2001-05, ASU Web Devil. All rights reserved. No reprints without permission.
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# posted by newshare @ 8:17 PM 0 comments

A citizen journalism experiment that's working in Watertown, Mass.?

A Citizen Journalism Experiment that's Working | Bayosphere
Lisa Williams (via Pressthink): If I Didn't Build it, They Wouldn't Come: Citizen Journalism is Discovered (Alive) in Watertown, MA. It seemed to me that a successful newsblog might have a business model that looked more like public radio – periodic pledge drives and underwriters – than the subscription/advertising model that many news outlets were dragging into the online world. To make it work, they’d have to get over something I suspected they and many journalists had: hesitation about being directly involved with handling the money. Link: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/11/14/lw_h2tn.html

# posted by newshare @ 4:59 PM 0 comments

BUSINESS MODELS: Church of the Customer Blog: The printed newspaper: Time to make it free

Church of the Customer Blog: The printed newspaper: Time to make it free: Marketing consultants Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba write: "Free is a stench to most publishers but free is the future pathway to staying relevant in a world of democratized news and information."

# posted by newshare @ 4:56 PM 0 comments

BLOG OBSERVATION: Our obsessions fuel participatory media

Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman of Hypergene Media Solutions, a media consulting and design firm write at their blog that, "If mainstream media want to enable citizen journalism or citizen contributions, what they need to focus on is how to enable the audience to feed their obsessions and share that experience with others."

# posted by newshare @ 4:53 PM 0 comments

VIDEO: Video BlogDebate: Left vs. Right Biased Journalism?

URL: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/11/prweb310448.htm
POSTED: Nov. 14, 2005

Video BlogDebate: Left vs. Right Biased Journalism?

USC Professor Murray Fromson, a long time news correspondent with CBS News
and Associated Press, asks "What's wrong with (being) the Left?" In a nine
minute video blog debate between the network veteran and media critic Brent
Bozell President of the Media Research Center who says the public believes
there is a liberal bias in the media and that reporters are giving their
own opinion. Moderated by Emmy Award winning host Leslie Dutton, the video
blog is set to be launched on the Full Disclosure Networkÿÿ Internet website
www.fulldisclosure.net on Monday, November 14, 2005, world wide 24/7 free
on demand.

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) November 14, 2005 -- In a nine minute video blog
debate USC Professor Murray Fromson, formerly with CBS news and Associated
Press argues ÿÿWhatÿÿs wrong with (being) the Left?ÿÿThatÿÿs what I want to
know. The whole hunt for communists, pro communists, socialists, liberals,
lefties as if there is something unpatriotic about Americans who express a
point of view that is different from the existing policy of the
government....ÿÿ

This video blog debate between the network veteran and media critic Brent
Bozell and frequent television commentator on FOX News Channel, is set to be
launched on the Full Disclosure Networkÿÿ Internet website
www.fulldisclosure.net on Monday, November 14, 2005, world wide 24/7 free on
demand.

Bozell, president of the Media Research Center described as unscrupulous,
news reporters who step over the line when they participate in news analysis
or become a part of the stories they have written. Fromson disagreed with
Bozell saying that reporters and journalists are basically the same except
journalists are trained not to be emotional. In describing the left vs.
right journalism feud, Fromson said he felt there was ÿÿa hang over from the
McCarthy period, from the hearings in the House Un-American Activities
committee.ÿÿ

Fromson who served as a news correspondent during the Vietnam war rebutted
Bozell, who maintains that the public no longer trusts the news media and
that reporters are biased. Each offers a contrasting view on investigative
journalists and their motives. Video clips for this debate were taken from
two separate, one-hour interviews with Bozell and Fromson and is moderated
by Emmy Award winning host Leslie Dutton whose Full Disclosure Networkÿÿ is
featured on 40 cable television systems for the past twelve years and video
streamed over the Internet for the past two years. Send your request for
updated cable channels and airtimes listings in your community.
# # #

POSTED BY:
Leslie Dutton
FULL DISCLOSURE NETWORK
Visit Our Site
310-822-4449
Email us Here
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# posted by newshare @ 1:30 PM 0 comments

Monday, November 14, 2005

AUDIO: An e-Democracy pioneer celebrates son's birth with podcast

EDITOR'S NOTE -- An e-Democracy pioneer introduces an MP3 audio speech of his visit to Mongolia to advise on Internet and communities through the metaphor of his first son's birth.

By Steven Clift http://dowire.org

Something wonderful happened last week. Liam Thomas Clift was born. This is the first child and son for my wife Laurel and I. Despite being surrounded with digital equipment, the miracle of birth is about the amazing power of life. Liam and Laurel are both doing great.

The first nights home in Minneapolis have been very good even through Liam seems stuck in Ireland's time zone. (Finding out that we were expecting on St. Patrick's Day and Laurel's Irish heritage made Liam, the 112th most popular boy name in the U.S., our number one choice.)

As I snapped photos of Liam, I happened to catch the first intrusion of digital technology in Liam life ... the digital thermometer being used the old-fashioned way. With his fist out, eyes wide and mouth open perhaps this is his first e-citizen protest? Earlier this year, I gave an important National Press Club "style" speech about Everyday Citizens: Community Life in the Information Age. When I walk down a street or drive through the countryside, I always imagine better ways to connect local people for stronger communities using information and communications technologies. There isn't one technical solution for this, but if we apply the required democratic motivation, we can make everyday citizenship part of our lives.

In this "coming home" speech, I summarize key e-democracy lessons I tend to present to different "democratic sectors" around the world. I do this by highlighting my trip to Mongolia and highlighting comments to their parliaments, Prime Minister and Presidential staff as well as civil society, students and media groups. I then reflect on "politics as usual" from Washington DC fostering a virtual civil war in the Unites States. A conclude with a positive outlook and how we can bring home many exciting grass roots uses of the Internet for everyday citizens in Minnesota (and beyond of course).

Listen: http://dowire.org/media/everydaycitizens.mp3

Please consider this one hour Power Point-free Everyday Citizens one hour speech in MP3 (15MB) my first podcast. Comments on the blog are encouraged: http://www.dowire.org/notes/?p=76#respond

If you have example links to share, add them on the Everyday Citizens wiki page: http://dowire.org/wiki/Everyday_citizens

So to Liam, I pledge to continue my efforts to strengthen local communities online and save democracy from the "default" path of the information age. I pledge to leave this world many many years from now a little bit better then when I arrived. I can help build a foundation for you, but it will be for you, like every other citizen before you, to decide that you want to make a real difference in the lives of others, in your local community and around the world.

Special thanks go out to the Information, Technology, and Everyday Life Initiative at the University of Minnesota for hosting this speech and Minnesota Public Radio for recording it.

This blog is now on parental leave until further notice. :-)

Steven L. Clift - - - W: http://publicus.net
Minneapolis - - - - E: clift@publicus.net
Minnesota - - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667
USA - - - - Skype/MSN/Y!/AIM: netclift
Join Democracies Online: http://dowire.org
Start an Issues Forum: http://e-democracy.org/if

# posted by newshare @ 1:45 PM 0 comments

Sunday, November 13, 2005

BLOGS: Business must pay attention to many more sources

ORIGINAL LINK:
http://www.nwherald.com/BusinessSection/14063980527575.php

PUBLISHED: Sunday, November 13, 2005

By H.J. CUMMINS
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune

Call it electronic gossip.

It is spread by thousands, if not millions, of conversations across the blogosphere, and it is catching the attention of
businesses everywhere.

Companies that used to have to monitor only newspapers, TV and Web sites now must reckon with the reality that their
names are being tossed about every day on one or another of 20 million blogs, or Web logs, worldwide.

Operated by people who are customers, competitors, employees and others, the blogs can contain everything from in-depth
product commentaries to random scathing comments. In short, they are the wild cards of modern communication, capable of
giving birth to real or invented scandal or spreading precious "word-of-mouth" praise.

The challenge of keeping up with the fast-mutating messages has companies hustling, or hiring out, for ever-more-refined
monitoring strategies.

"Blogs are a technology-enabled grapevine," said Mark Weiner, president of Delahaye, a media research company. "They're
very powerful. They have no borders and no rules."

"Something new is being done to companies by this enormous force and collection of people, who are writing and talking to
each other about them," said Dan Gillmor, the author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the
People."

"Businesses should use the same tools and techniques to join the conversation," Gillmor said.

A recent search for "3M" on Google's blog search engine pulled up 54,915 hits ÿÿ including a college student's account of
his summer internship, a quarterly earnings report, and the relocation of a meeting from Room 3N to Room 3M.

Plug in "General Mills," and among the 13,772 hits there is one blogger's dream about trying to cash in her cereal box
tops and another's anger at the company's "viral marketing" campaign for Lucky Charms cereals.

Both companies said they now pay attention to blogs.

"We definitely monitor blogs, like any other forms of media, and we respond when we feel like we need to," 3M spokeswoman
Jacqueline Berry said.

At General Mills, "we read blogs and look for anything new or different that hasn't come to our attention before,"
spokeswoman Kirstie Foster said. "Then being able to cross-reference them with the million calls, e-mails and letters
from consumers each year makes it easier to determine the issues that need to be addressed."

Google has just one of a growing number of blog search engines. Technorati has another.

There are even uber-search engines, including one called BlogPulse, that also rank what's "the buzz" moment to moment in
the blogosphere and tracks which bloggers are getting lots of attention measured partly by numbers of hits and links.

At Delahaye, the screening process sends blog hits through a series of technological and human screenings devised by
Delahaye, Weiner said. People make the final calls on whether postings are good, bad or neutral, he said, or even whether
they're accurate.

When bad news cascades from an influential blog, Weiner advises clients to post a message on that blog explaining why
they believe the original posting is wrong or unfair.

"Honorable bloggers don't want to be wrong," Gillmor said.

Then the same blog culture that propelled the original posting far and wide will carry the client's response.

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# posted by newshare @ 7:17 PM 0 comments

BUSINESS MODELS: How well will pay-on-demand for content personalization work, columnist asks?

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/business/yourmoney/13frenzy.html

A New York Times media columnist speculates that the success of ring tones, downloadable iTunes music and announcements about video-on-demand by the clip via the Internet suggest the public may be willing to pay for content on a per-use basis -- especially when the consumer is able to "time shift" their reading, viewing or listening. Richard Siklos writes Nov. 13, 2005 that the "limits of what people will pay for personalization -- getting what they want, when they want it -- have yet to be tested." Sikos' conclusion: It's not a question of whether pay-on-demand efforts will work, but "how well they will work."

COLUMN: Media Frenzy
Published: November 13, 2005

HEADLINE: It's Like Selling Meals by the Bite. And It May Work.

By RICHARD SIKLOS
The New York Times

HOW much is this sentence - the very one you are reading right now - worth? Is it potentially more valuable than this entire column, this section, or the entire newspaper itself? This is not a play for a raise or a plug for the genius of my prose, but a riff on the latest mania in media-land: finding new ways to be paid for old material. Nearly every day, it seems, a new business strategy emerges that on its face may sound not only counterintuitive but also absurd. Then consumers start to buy it, and you can only say, "Who knew?"

The ultimate example of this is the ring tone - the grating, pulsing rendition of the Macarena or an old Whitesnake song that has replaced the annoying blaring ring on the cellphone of the person sitting next to you on the bus. When media companies of every stripe are facing increased competition and rising costs for programming and marketing, here is a product that consumers love - and that simply reuses a fragment of existing recordings.

According to the NPD Group, a research firm, 18 percent of wireless telephone subscribers in the United States - many of them tech-wise teenagers - download ring tones, at an average cost of $2.32 a pop. Informa, a British research and analysis firm, forecasts that ring tones will grow to a $6.8 billion global business in 2010 from nearly $5 billion in 2005, with the North American business growing to $1.5 billion from $510 million. Who knew?

Now, it seems, every media business is in search of its variation on the ring-tone premise. Last week, we learned that both Google and Amazon.com were working on services that would allow readers to buy electronic versions of books, either by the page or by the chapter.

In one respect, this sounds like very much a back-to-the-future concept, harking back to the days when Dickens's work first appeared in serial form. But, really, it's probably less about reading the latest "Harry Potter" installment a bit at a time than it is about parceling out passages and chapters of books for how-to or research purposes. Just as a music lover may want to buy a great single but not the whole album, a student may want a relevant chapter for her research but not the entire book.

Another recent twist on this theme is Apple's ingenious idea to sell rock videos to download on its latest iPod; Apple proudly declared that it sold its first million video downloads, at $1.99 apiece, in less than three weeks. Among the top sellers it cited were music videos from Michael Jackson and Kanye West, short films from Pixar and episodes of ABC network television hits, including "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives."

While Apple did not break down the downloads by type, the fact that any music videos have a retail monetary value is fairly remarkable. After all, music companies largely produce them as promotional vehicles in the hope that they will gain attention from MTV or its imitators. And there are already countless Web sites for viewing them free. Who knew?

The latest entrant in these sweepstakes was the exciting but complicated news from CBS and NBC Universal that they had separately entered into video-on-demand deals to sell fresh reruns of some of their most popular programs at 99 cents each. CBS made its deal with Comcast, the big cable company, while NBC Universal's was with DirecTV, the satellite TV giant controlled by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

In the case of CBS it has agreed - in markets where it owns its own TV stations, as opposed to where it supplies programs to independently owned affiliates - to let Comcast digital cable subscribers buy episodes of four top shows, including "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," from within hours of their initial broadcast until the next episode is broadcast a week later. NBC Universal is offering a total of six shows, including "Law & Order: SVU," in a similar fashion on DirecTV. Unlike the CBS shows on Comcast, NBC's shows on DirecTV will initially be free of advertisements; but to buy them on demand, a DirecTV subscriber will need a new version of a digital video recorder that is about to hit stores.

Everyone involved cautioned that these were just baby steps. But the bigger point is that it is now possible to envision a world not too far in the future where all imaginable types of programs, including the latest movies and top-rated network TV shows, are available through some kind of download or video-on-demand system.

Then again, both the CBS and NBC ventures instantly conjured a good deal of skepticism. An obvious question is this: Who on earth will pay for a rerun of a show that he or she can watch free in the first place? More and more people have digital video recorders like TiVo that simply record free programs onto a hard drive, letting viewers enjoy them anytime and fast-forward through the commercials. (In NBC's deal, it's a doubly relevant point, because you actually need that new DVR in order to buy these shows on demand after they've been broadcast.)

The answer from all involved is that they still expect most viewers to watch their favorite shows when the networks have scheduled them - and, of course, the networks want their advertisers and affiliates to be reassured that they really, really believe this. This new video-on-demand window, they say, is simply a way to capture easy money from people who either don't have DVR's or forgot to record a show. Even better, the networks say, the water-cooler buzz about a great episode the previous night may spur some people to buy a show they wouldn't have watched in the first place, get hooked and then tune in for the next episode.

The funny thing is, it may work. After all, TV producers have found unexpected riches in selling DVD compilations of popular new shows, proving that consumers are not averse to paying for something that they might find on reruns or in syndication, if they just bothered to look.

TWO lessons are apparent in all these attempts to revamp media business models. One is that the limits of what people will pay for personalization - getting what they want, when they want it - have yet to be tested. The other is that consumers are not nearly as pragmatic as they may imagine themselves.

A case in point: remember all those late fees that Blockbuster used to charge on video rentals? Pragmatic folks would have returned the videos on time. Another example: just this morning I brewed a pot of coffee at home, drank a cup and poured the rest down the sink. The pragmatic me would fill up before I left the house, or maybe get an old-school Thermos. The real me bought another cup from the vendor on the corner outside the office just as I arrived for work.

As media companies slice and dice their products into new businesses, the central issue is not so much whether they will work as how well they will work. Just as the ring tone has not saved the music industry - it has only mitigated its troubles - will gains from chapters-on-demand or video-on-demand offset the digital challenges of the publishing and video industries?

Who knows?

# posted by newshare @ 7:42 AM 0 comments

EDUCATION: What is "media-literacy education"? A backgrounder

http://www.blackenterprise.com/yb/ybopen.asp?section=ybng&story_id=85337444&ID=blackenterprise

What is media-literacy education: A backgrounder from the National Media
Education Conference in San Francisco, June 25-28, 2005

By vanMeenen, Karen
Blck Enterprise Magazine

The media literacy and education movement is growing rapidly in this country
and abroad and the most recent edition of the biannual National Media
Education Conference offered a wide array of practical and theoretical
information under the theme of "Giving Voice to a Diverse Nation." Sponsored
by the Alliance for a Media Literate America, the event drew educators,
media activists, health workers, students of media literacy and youth media
makers for three days of workshops, presentations, lectures and screenings.
Four prc-conference sessions were offered, including Media Literacy 101,
facilitated by Elizabeth Thoman and Jeff Share, both of the Center for Media
Literacy based in Los Angeles, which set the stage for the conference. To
introduce attendees to the field, Thoman, explained that media literacy is
"a twenty-first-century approach to education," providing "a framework to
access, analyze, evaluate and create messages in a variety of forms-from
print to video to the internet." A more expansive way of looking at the
general concept of "literacy"-addressing images, sound and pop culture as
well as text-this burgeoning field expands reading and writing instruction
in educational settings and in general deepens our ability to understand how
media affects individual citizens and society. Intrinsic to this process is
building the "essential skills of inquiry" as well as an understanding of
the role of media in our culture. While stressing enhanced critical thinking
abilities and encouraging production of media as an essential complement,
Thoman clarified that media education is more about education than media.
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Offering essentially a primer to the field, Thoman explained that the
equation "Text + Context = Message" (expanding upon, and in some ways
contradicting, media theorist Marshall McLuhan's contention that content
matters less than medium) lies at the heart of the media education movement.
She took attendees through the "Five Core Concepts" and "Five Key Questions"
that provide a structure and vocabulary for analyzing media that is similar
to literary analysis. These concepts and questions are directly correlated
and speak to the issues of authorship, format, audience, content and
purpose. Thoman addressed the specifics, providing information about how
media education can be used in the classroom to lead students into more
in-depth inquiry. For example, in terms of audience, there are three ways in
which audiences interact with media: reactive, active and interactive. By
providing students and citizens the tools to become interactive and
therefore engaged consumers of media, (media literacy) educators empower the
citizenry. To demonstrate this, Thoman explained the concept of the
"empowerment spiral" that is created through media literacy applications,
which consists of awareness, analysis, reflection and action.
While Media Literacy 101 provided a solid foundation for delving into the
field of media education, the breakout sessions that took place during the
conference went into more detail on specific issues and practical matters.
With a focus on providing media education in the K-12 classroom, many of the
presentations explained how media education can be included in curriculum
(and across disciplines), demonstrated successful programs being implemented
around the country and addressed how media literacy instruction can meet
numerous educational standards. Such presentations included "Using Media to
Boost Skills and Scores" and "Have Your Students Grade the News,"
facilitated by former journalists Paul Kandell and John McManus, creators of
www.gradethenews. org, who took attendees through their specialized
curriculum. Other presentations were centered on media production, a vital
component of formal media education and community-based efforts. These
included "Promising Practices in Community-Based Media Programs" and "It
Takes a Village with a Camera: Community Building Through Media Education,"
in which youth-made media about the conditions of the Baltimore City Public
School System and the community protests that resulted from this advocacy
were highlighted. Several breakout sessions had a more political or social
reform bent such as "One Economy & the Digital Connectors Program:
Connecting Low Income Youth and Communities to the Digital World" and "Ain't
Gonna Study War No More: Media and Peace Education." Bob McCannon, founder
(in 1993) of the New Mexico Media Literacy Project and Josh Silver of Free
Press (which he co- founded, in 2002, with Robert McChesney and John
Nichols) presented the dynamic, eye-opening and inspiring "Media Literacy,
Independent Media & Media Reform." A few sessions addressed the issue of our
global culture, including "Media Literacy in Europe and the U.S.A.:
Similarities, Differences and Collaboration Possibilities," "Multimedia +
Multiculture - Multiliteracy" and "Documentary as Professional Development:
Putting a Human Face on New Demographics," in which Elaine Shen of Active
Voice demonstrated how teachers can sensitize themselves to the growing
immigrant population. In "Media Literacy and Global Studies," teacher,
author and media advocate Barry Duncan used myriad media examples from
around the world to provide updated educational perspectives on the
representation of self and others as well as a consideration of the collapse
of private into public space.
Still from The Unheard (2005) by Tania Cervantes
The topic of pop culture was addressed in numerous ways, including "Youth
Culture Symbolism: Do Music Videos Teach At-Risk Adolescent Girls?" and
"Movies, TV & Character Education: Why Media Literacy Matters," in which
Rose Pacatte of the Pauline Center for Media Studies used popular television
programs to show how character education can be enhanced by media literacy
tools. Much of the media literacy work currently being done in schools
revolves around drug and alcohol education and other health issues such as
HIV and eating disorders, as evidenced in "AD IT UP: A Health-Related Media
Literacy TV Pilot," "Media Literacy and Healthy Bodies" and "The Media
Straight Up!," in which Renee Hobbs of Temple University provided concrete
examples of activities for use in substance abuse curricula. David
Considine, in his presentation "GET REEL: Teens, Sex and the Media,"
advocated for "richer reads" and spoke of the power parents have to
reinforce and refute media content by modeling behaviors that challenge or
confirm the media.
Central to the foundation of media education is media production and many
sessions addressed practical considerations or exhibited the results of such
activity. Several interactive workshops such as "And the Story is...: Using
Digital Storytelling to Find Voice" offered practical advice on media
production. During "Youth Media Distribution" Shira Golding of MediaRights
took production issues one step further, offering strategies for creative
partnerships and effective distribution. During the presentation "Story
Starters," staff of the Bay Area Video Coalition provided a hands-on
demonstration of storyboard creation and invited one of the youth who
participated in their media program to present her work. Tania Cervantes
interviewed homeless Hispanic men in San Francisco's Mission district. The
resulting video, The Unheard (2005), is a moving portrait of a segment of
the population whose stories are rarely told as well as a testament to the
empowering nature of media production education for youth.

# posted by newshare @ 7:30 AM 0 comments

Saturday, November 12, 2005

FIRST AMENDMENT: Lecture by Patrick Butler, Washington Post

On Oct. 27, 2005, Patrick Butler, vice president of The Washington Post,
lectured at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University on "The
First Amendment in the 21st Century." Here audio of the one hour and 15-minute
lecture (and Q&A) from here:
http://uc.princeton.edu/main/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=177&Itemid=9
The speech text, in Microsoft Word, supplied by Mr. Butler to the Media Giraffe Project, is here:
http://www.mediagiraffe.org/docs/first_amendment_butler_11-27-05.doc

# posted by newshare @ 1:57 PM 0 comments

NYTimes Nocera column: Trying to Wean Internet Users from Free

ORIGINAL LINK:
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/11/12/business/media/12nocera.html?ts_offers=Y&tsType=try&oid=82&oref=login&incamp=ts:chall_article_trial&headline=Trying+to+Wean+Internet+Users+From+Free&
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Today 27 percent of The Times's revenue comes from circulation, and 66 percent
from advertising. Six percent of all newspaper ads are now online -- and for
many, the website only gets paid when a readers "clicksthrough" the ad.
Does it make sense for newspapers to start charging for content online?
Columnist Joseph Nocera says yes -- although it is painful.

November 12, 2005
Trying to Wean Internet Users From Free

A COLUMN BY:
By JOSEPH NOCERA
The New York Times
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/columns/josephnocera/?inline=nyt-per

PEOPLE hate, hate, hate to subscribe to things on the Internet," Microsoft's
chairman, Bill Gates, said a few weeks ago.

Mr. Gates was sitting in the 14th-floor boardroom of The New York Times,
speaking to a small gathering of executives, editors, editorial board members
and reporters. Rather painfully for us, while he was making a broad point about
consumers and the Web, the specific example under discussion was TimesSelect.
That, of course, is this company's nearly two-month experiment to, well, see if
people will subscribe to things on the Internet.

Or at least to see if they'll pay a subscription fee to read New York Times
columnists online. For years now, The Times has largely posted its content
free, relying on advertising to generate revenue. With the TimesSelect program,
however, the columnists have been put behind a wall.

Newspaper subscribers can still read the columnists online free - though they
have to sign up for TimesSelect to do so. But those who read The Times only
online must now pay $49.95 a year (or $7.95 a month) to get their fix of
Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Frank Rich and the newspaper's other
columnists, myself included. (TimesSelect subscribers also gain access to the
newspaper's archives and some other online-only goodies.)

From the start, TimesSelect has been controversial. Part of the opposition
comes from that segment of the digerati who tend to believe that information on
the Internet should be free as a matter of principle. Others simply don't want
to pay for something they're used to getting free. Twice in the last month or
so, I've had the odd experience of having wealthy Wall Street guys I've
interviewed for this column ask me to e-mail it to them because they refuse to
subscribe to TimesSelect.

There are other, more philosophical, objections as well. Mickey Kaus, an
unrelenting critic of TimesSelect who writes the popular kausfiles blog for the
Slate online magazine, told me recently that he had no particular objection to
paying for Internet content. "What I object to," he said, "is the idea that The
New York Times is essentially saying that its columnists' opinions are so much
superior to everyone else's that they are going to charge for it."

Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor who writes a blog called
PressThink, said he believed that the move would wind up hurting the
columnists. "What is the product?" he said. "It's influence." With so much of
the political conversation now taking place online, he said, Times columnists
would inevitably be less influential if only paying subscribers could read
them. This view is shared by some of the columnists themselves.

SO it was a bit of a surprise, after all the sturm und drang, to see the early
results of The Times's online subscription experiment. They're not half bad. In
a news release issued Wednesday morning, the company reported that since it
began in mid-September, TimesSelect has generated 270,000 subscribers, half of
whom already subscribed to the newspaper (and hence get the new service free)
and half of whom were plunking down cold, hard cash.

To be sure, that is a far cry from the million-plus people who spend as much as
$600 a year to buy the dead-tree version of The Times, and it's not even
remotely close to the 20 million-plus "unique visitors" who come to the Times
Web site each month. But it's something. Martin Nisenholtz, who is in charge of
digital operations for The New York Times Company, told me that the numbers
were "at the high end" of expectations.

It is far too early, of course, to predict whether TimesSelect will ultimately
succeed. The roughly 135,000 online-only subscribers could represent a new
willingness on the part of consumers to pay for newspaper content online - or
not. But what I've wound up wondering is whether, even if it is a roaring
success, TimesSelect - and other online subscription models that are bound to
follow - will be enough to stop the erosion of the economics that underlie
newspaper journalism. I'm not terribly sanguine.

Mr. Nisenholtz said that The Times had always assumed that it would eventually
find a second revenue stream. "Advertising is always going to be cyclical," he
said. "And businesses that have only one revenue stream tend not to be as
healthy as those with multiple revenue streams."

It is hardly a surprise that a newspaper company executive would want to
generate subscription revenue as well as advertising revenue: that's the way it
has always worked in the business. Today, for instance, 27 percent of The
Times's revenue comes from circulation, and 66 percent from advertising. (The
other 7 percent come from things like syndication.) Indeed, in the world of
paper and print, a healthy paid circulation helps generate ad revenue, because
advertisers like to see that readers care enough about a publication to pay for
it.

But on the Internet, general interest publications charge for content at their
peril. The Wall Street Journal has largely pulled it off - it has 764,000
subscribers to its Web site, and it even charges people who subscribe to the
actual newspaper (though at a reduced rate).

But The Journal is the exception to the rule. In 1998, Slate magazine put its
site behind a paid wall. It was a dismal failure - "the worst year in Slate's
history," recalls the editor, Jacob Weisberg, who was then a writer for the
site. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution tried to get readers to pay for some of
its online sports content; it gave up after a year. For two years, The Los
Angeles Times charged readers for its online Calendarlive section; it threw in
the towel in May.

These efforts didn't work because they generated too few subscribers to
interest advertisers. Calendarlive was particularly misguided because the movie
and other entertainment listings it produced were exactly the kind of content
advertisers love.

Which also helps explain the series of choices The New York Times has made.
Like many newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Times focused on
generating large numbers of viewers that it could deliver to advertisers. To do
that, it needed to keep its content free, even if it meant that some readers
were bound to give up their newspaper subscription and go to the free Web site
instead.

And then, when the company decided that its Web operation was strong enough
that it could experiment with a second revenue stream, it chose to use its
columnists as the guinea pigs for basic economic reasons.

For starters, the Op-Ed columnists in particular are popular with readers, so
there was a decent chance that consumers might be willing to pay to read them.
In addition, though, moving the columnists from free to paid brought the least
risk of cutting into advertising revenue. You'll notice that the company hasn't
put New York Times movie reviewers, who are also quite popular, into
TimesSelect. Movie and entertainment pages are as important to New York Times
advertisers as they are to Los Angeles Times advertisers.

From a purely business point of view, this all makes a reasonable amount of
sense. TimesSelect strikes me as a worthy experiment, even with the obvious
downside for the paper's columnists, who don't have the readership they had
before going behind the paid wall.

Besides, at a time when newspapers are struggling - with circulation down at
many newspapers, and readers and advertisers increasingly moving to the
Internet - The Times has to do everything it can to find ways to maximize the
amount of money it generates from its Web site. So does any newspaper that
wants to continue doing ambitious journalism. When journalists criticize
TimesSelect, Mr. Nisenholtz said, they seem to forget that the primary goal is
to find a business model that will make it possible to continue paying for
serious journalism, which at The Times costs over $200 million a year.

This, though, is precisely where I become discouraged. Look at what happened to
the music industry, which tried - and has largely failed - to sustain its
pre-Internet revenue as the Web destroyed its business model. It has
ham-handedly tried to beat back technology with litigation, but no matter how
many courtroom victories it reaps, the technology keeps winning in the
marketplace.

Or look at what is happening to telephony, or film, or all sorts of businesses
that are undergoing wrenching change thanks to the rise of the Internet.
Margins shrink. Revenue drops. Profits dwindle.

From where I'm sitting, it sure looks as if the same is happening in the
newspaper business. The ruthless efficiency of the Internet, for instance, is
changing the way ads are paid for. In print, an advertiser places an ad and
pays for it - end of story. Online, most ads generate revenue only when readers
click on them. And the rates are much lower.

William G. Bird, a Citigroup analyst who covers the newspaper business, says
that 6 percent of all newspaper ads are now online. He compared it to taking
money out of one pocket and putting it in another. But here's the painful
twist: "For every dollar coming out of the dead-tree pocket," he said, "only 33
cents is going back into the online pocket."

Doesn't TimesSelect - which, remember, costs $49.95 a year - suggest that down
the line, there will be a similar contraction in circulation revenue? And
that's if the experiment succeeds! Yes, as more readers gravitate to the Web,
distribution and paper costs will surely be reduced. But it's highly unlikely
that those savings will offset the hit to revenues.

Esther Dyson, who edits the influential technology newsletter Release 1.0,
compared the Internet's effect on newspapers to the effect of the open source
movement on the software industry: "It doesn't steal your business," she said.
"It erodes it."

As a business journalist, I've tended not to worry a lot about music executives
trying to salvage their broken business model. My general view has been that if
they can't adapt to disruptive technologies, then they probably deserve their
fate. But in the six months I've been in the newspaper business, I've learned
to have some sympathy for those who are staring down the barrel of the
Internet.

It's not fun.

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# posted by newshare @ 11:08 AM 0 comments

Ex-Post editor describes failure of press-government relationship

FROM THE NATION MAGAZINE:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051121/greider
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

William Greider, a prominent political journalist and author, has been a
reporter for more than 35 years for newspapers, magazines and television.
Over the past two decades, he has persistently challenged mainstream
thinking on economics.

For 17 years Greider was the National Affairs Editor at Rolling Stone
magazine, where his investigation of the defense establishment began. He
is a former assistant managing editor at the Washington Post, where he
worked for 15 years as a national correspondent, editor and
columnist. While at the Post, he broke the story of how David Stockman,
Ronald Reagan's budget director, grew disillusioned with supply-side
economics and the budget deficits that policy caused, which still burden
the American economy.

He is the author of the national bestsellers One World, Ready or Not,
Secrets of the Temple and Who Will Tell The People. In the award-winning
Secrets of the Temple, he offered a critique of the Federal Reserve
system. Greider has also served as a correspondent for six Frontline
documentaries on PBS, including "Return to Beirut," which won an Emmy in
1985.

Greider's next book will be The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to A
Moral Economy. In it, he untangles the systemic mysteries of American
capitalism, details its destructive collisions with society and
demonstrates how people can achieve decisive influence to reform the
system's structure and operating values. Raised in Wyoming, Ohio, a suburb
of Cincinnati, he graduated from Princeton University in 1958. He
currently lives in Washington, DC.

All the King's Media

By WILLIAM GREIDER

[from the November 21, 2005 issue]

Amid the smoke and stench of burning careers, Washington feels a bit like
the last days of the ancien régime. As the world's finest democracy, we do
not do guillotines. But there are other less bloody rituals of
humiliation, designed to reassure the populace that order is restored, the
Republic cleansed. Let the perp walks begin. Whether the public feels
reassured is another matter.

George W. Bush's plight leads me to thoughts of Louis XV and his royal
court in the eighteenth century. Politics may not have changed as much as
modern pretensions assume. Like Bush, the French king was quite popular
until he was scorned, stubbornly self-certain in his exercise of power yet
strangely submissive to manipulation by his courtiers. Like Louis Quinze,
our American magistrate (whose own position was secured through court
intrigues, not elections) has lost the "royal touch." Certain influential
cliques openly jeer the leader they not so long ago extolled; others
gossip about royal tantrums and other symptoms of lost direction. The
accusations stalking his important counselors and assembly leaders might
even send some of them to jail. These political upsets might matter less
if the government were not so inept at fulfilling its routine obligations,
like storm relief. The king's sorry war drags on without resolution, with
people still arguing over why exactly he started it. The staff of
life--oil, not bread--has become punishingly expensive. The government is
broke, borrowing formidable sums from rival nations. The king pretends
nothing has changed.

The burnt odor in Washington is from the disintegrating authority of the
governing classes. The public's darkest suspicions seem confirmed.
Flagrant money corruption, deceitful communication of public plans and
purposes, shocking incompetence--take your pick, all are involved. None
are new to American politics, but they are potently fused in the present
circumstances. A recent survey in Wisconsin found that only 6 percent of
citizens believe their elected representatives serve the public interest.
If they think that of state and local officials, what must they think of
Washington?

We are witnessing, I suspect, something more momentous than the disgrace
of another American President. Watergate was red hot, but always about
Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon. This convergence of scandal and failure
seems more systemic, less personal. The new political force for change is
not the squeamish opposition party called the Democrats but a common
disgust and anger at the sordidness embedded in our dysfunctional
democracy. The wake from that disgust may prove broader than Watergate's
(when democracy was supposedly restored by Nixon's exit), because the
anger is also splashing over once-trusted elements of the establishment.

Heroic truth-tellers in the Watergate saga, the established media are now
in disrepute, scandalized by unreliable "news" and over-intimate
attachments to powerful court insiders. The major media stood too close to
the throne, deferred too eagerly to the king's twisted version of reality
and his lust for war. The institutions of "news" failed democracy on
monumental matters. In fact, the contemporary system looks a lot more like
the ancien régime than its practitioners realize. Control is top-down and
centralized. Information is shaped (and tainted) by the proximity of
leading news-gatherers to the royal court and by their great distance from
people and ordinary experience.

People do find ways to inform themselves, as best they can, when the
regular "news" is not reliable. In prerevolutionary France, independent
newspapers were illegal--forbidden by the king--and books and pamphlets,
rigorously censored by the government. Yet people developed a complex
shadow system by which they learned what was really going on--the news
that did not appear in official court pronouncements and privileged
publications. Cultural historian Robert Darnton, in brilliantly original
works like The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, has mapped the
informal but politically potent news system by which Parisians of high and
low status circulated court secrets or consumed the scandalous books known
as libelles, along with subversive songs, poems and gossip, often leaked
from within the king's own circle. News traveled in widening circles.
Parisians gathered in favored cafes, designated park benches or exclusive
salons, where the forbidden information was read aloud and copied by
others to pass along. Parisians could choose for themselves which reality
they believed. The power of the French throne was effectively finished,
one might say, once the king lost control of the news. (It was his
successor, Louis XVI, who lost his head.)

Something similar, as Darnton noted, is occurring now in American society.
The centralized institutions of press and broadcasting are being
challenged and steadily eroded by widening circles of unlicensed "news"
agents--from talk-radio hosts to Internet bloggers and others--who compete
with the official press to be believed. These interlopers speak in a
different language and from many different angles of vision. Less
authoritative, but more democratic. The upheaval has only just begun, but
already even the best newspapers are hemorrhaging circulation. Dan
Gillmor, an influential pioneer and author of We the Media, thinks
tomorrow's news, the reporting and production, will be "more of a
conversation, or a seminar"--less top-down, and closer to how people
really speak about their lives.

Which brings us to the sappy operetta of the reporter and her influential
source: Scooter Libby, the Vice President's now-indicted war wonk, and
Judith Miller, the New York Times's intrepid reporter and First Amendment
martyr. What seems most shocking about their relationship is the intimacy.
"Come back to work--and life," Scooter pleaded in a letter to Judy, doing
her eighty-five days in jail. "Out west, where you vacation, the aspens
will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots
connect them." Miller responded in her bizarre first-person Times account
by telling a cherished memory of Scooter. Out West, she said, a man in
sunglasses, dressed like a cowboy, approached and spoke to her: "Judy,
it's Scooter Libby."

Are Washington reporters really that close to their sources? For her part,
Miller has a "tropism toward powerful men," as Times columnist Maureen
Dowd delicately put it. This is well-known gossip in court circles, but
let's not go there. Boy reporters also suck up to powerful men with
shameful deference, wanting to be loved by the insiders so they can be
inside too (shades of the French courtiers). The price of intimacy is
collected in various coins, but older hands in the news business
understand what is being sold. The media, Christopher Dickey of Newsweek
observed in a web essay, "long ago concluded having access to power is
more important than speaking truth to it."

The elite press, like any narcissistic politician, tells a heart-warming
myth about itself. Reporters, it is said, dig out the hard facts to share
with the people by locating anonymous truth-tellers inside government.
They then protect these sources from retaliation by refusing to name them,
even at the cost of going to prison. That story line was utterly smashed
by this scandal. Reporters were prepared to go to jail to protect sources
who were not exactly whistleblowers cowering in anonymity. They were Libby
and Karl Rove--the king's own counselors at the pinnacle of government.
They were the same guys who collaborated on the bloodiest political
deception of the Bush presidency: the lies that took the country into war.
So, in a sense, the press was also protecting itself from further
embarrassment. The major media, including the best newspapers, all got the
war wrong, and for roughly the same reason--their compliant proximity to
power. With a few honorable exceptions, they bought into the lies and led
cheers for war. They ignored or downplayed the dissent from some military
leaders and declined to explore tough questions posed by anyone outside
the charmed circle. The nation may not soon forget this abuse of
privileged status, nor should it.

Leaks and whispers are a daily routine of news-gathering in Washington.
The sweet irony of President Bush's predicament is that it was partly
self-induced. His White House deputies enforced discipline on reporters
and insiders, essentially shutting down the stream of nonofficial
communications and closing the informal portals for dissent and dispute
within government. This was new in the Bush era, and it's ultimately been
debilitating. It has made reporters still more dependent on the official
spin, as the Administration wanted, but it has also sealed off the king
from the flow of high-level leaks and informative background noises that
help vet developing policies and steer reporters to the deeper news.

The paradox of our predicament is that, unlike the ancien régime, US
citizens do enjoy free speech, free press and other rights to disturb the
powerful. In this country you can say aloud or publish just about anything
you like. But will anyone hear you? The audible range of diverse and
rebellious voices has been visibly shrunk in the last generation. The
corporate concentration of media ownership has put a deadening blanket
over the usual cacophony of democracy, with dissenting voices screened for
acceptability by young and often witless TV producers. Corporate owners
have a strong stake in what gets said on their stations. Why piss off the
President when you will need his good regard for so many things? Viewers
have a zillion things to watch, but if you jump around the dial, with luck
you will always be watching a General Electric channel.

How did it happen that the multiplication of outlets made possible by
technology led to a concentration of views and opinions--ones usually
anchored by the conventional wisdom of center-right sensibilities? Where
did the "freedom" go? Where are the people's ideas and observations? Al
Gore, who found his voice after he lost the presidency, recently expressed
his sense of alarm: "I believe that American democracy is in grave danger.
It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public
discourse." The bread-and-circuses format that monopolizes the public's
airwaves is driven by a condescending commercial calculation that
Americans are too stupid to want anything more. But that assumption
becomes fragile as other voices find other venues for expression. This is
an industry crisis that will be very healthy for the society, a political
opening to rearrange access and licensing for democratic purposes.

For the faltering press, the bloggers will keep sharpening their swords,
slicing away at the established order. This is good, but the pressure will
lead to meaningful change only if the Internet artisans innovate further,
organizing new formats and techniques for networking among more diverse
people and interests. The daily feed of facts and bile from bloggers has
been wondrously effective in unmasking the pretensions of the big boys,
but the broader society needs more--something closer to the democratic
"conversations and seminars" that Gillmor envisions, and less dependent on
partisan fury and accusation.

As an ex-Luddite, I came to the web with the skepticism of an old print
guy. Against expectations, I am experiencing sustained exchanges with many
far-flung people I've never met--dialogues that inform both of us and are
utterly voluntary experiences. This is a promising new form of consent.
Democracy, I once wrote, begins not at election time but in human
conversation.

Establishment newspapers like the New York Times face a special dilemma,
one they may not easily resolve. Under assault, do editors and reporters
align still more closely with the establishment interests to maintain an
air of "authority," or do they get down with folks and dish it out to the
powerful? Scandal and crisis compelled the Times to lower its veil of
authority a bit and acknowledge error (a shocking development itself). But
while the Times is in my view the best, most interesting newspaper, it
always will be establishment. For instance, it could be more honest about
its longstanding newsroom tensions between "liberals" and "neocons." What
the editors might re-examine is their own defensive concept of what's
authoritative. It is not just Bush's war that blinded sober judgment and
led to narrow coverage. In many other important areas--political decay and
global economics, among others--the Times (like other elite papers) seems
afraid to acknowledge that wider, more fundamental debate exists. It
chooses to report only one side--the side of received elite opinion.

Readers do understand--surprise!--that the Times is not infallible. A
newspaper comes out every day and gets something wrong. Tomorrow, it comes
out again and can try to get it right. In essence, that is what people and
critics already know. They are more likely to be forgiving if the
newspaper loosens up a bit and makes room for more divergent
understandings of what's happening. But as more irreverent voices elbow
their way into the "news" system, the big media are likely to lose still
more audience if they cannot get more distance from throne and power.

What will come of all this? Possibly, not much. The cluster of scandals
and breakdown may simply feed the people's alienation and resignation. The
governing elites, including major media, are in denial, unwilling to speak
honestly about the perilous economic circumstances ahead, the burgeoning
debt from global trade, the sinking of the working class and other
threatening conditions. When those realities surface, many American lives
will be upended with no available recourse and no one in authority they
can trust, since the denial and evasion are bipartisan. That's a very
dangerous situation for a society--an invitation to irrational angers and
scapegoating. It will require a new, more encompassing politics to avert
an ugly political contagion. We need more reliable "news" to recover
democracy.

----------------------------------------------------------------

# posted by newshare @ 10:10 AM 0 comments

Thursday, November 10, 2005

NEWSPAPER FUTURES: Companies' acquisitions suggest effort to cope

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB113142165259390911-lMyQjAxMDE1MzAxODQwMjgxWj.html

Newspapers in an Electronic Age

By CLARK GILBERT and SCOTT D. ANTHONY
November 8, 2005; Page B2

As innovative technologies and business models with transformational
potential continue to emerge, the world of the newspaper publisher has
grown progressively darker. Five years ago, eBay and Monster.com started
to slice off pieces of the classifieds. Recently, Google's news and search
offerings and the Web logs began to threaten the hegemony of the
traditional media's command-and-control structure. Throw in podcasts and
free commuter newspapers and you have a potent brew indeed.

The newspaper industry is now roughly 400 years old, and, generally
speaking, it is confronting a "disruptive" change unprecedented in its
history. The emerging challengers can't comprehensively measure up to
leading newspapers' detailed reporting capability, institutional
advantages and deep local reach. All of them, however, feature revenue
streams and content delivery models that run counter to those of most
newspapers -- and they are breaking paths into new territories.

Still, newspaper companies are not standing idly by. Every major player
has made a move on the Internet, and their properties -- and appetite for
acquisitions -- are growing rapidly. Knight Ridder, Gannett and the
Tribune Corporation built CareerBuilder.com and bought a controlling stake
in news aggregator Topix.net. In the last year, the New York Times
acquired About.com, the Washington Post picked up Slate, Dow Jones bought
CBS MarketWatch and News Corp. acquired Intermix and MySpace.com.

So how, then, do we judge the recent spate of acquisitions? Are these
rational choices meant to extend these companies into the online space, or
are these the signs of panicked companies reacting to the threat of online
media?

Our research over the last year in the newspaper industry suggests market
analysts (and media companies) can use three criteria to resolve these
questions. First, do these acquisitions enable companies to reach into new
market spaces populated by "nonconsumers," people who can't solve the
problems they face because they lack access, knowledge or expertise?

On the consumer side, consider people who use searchable databases and
blogs to access content not available in traditional media or to engage
with the content in new ways. "Nonconsuming" advertisers might be
companies who do not currently advertise with print media but are very
active online. Only one of the top 25 online advertisers at a major U.S.
newspaper we worked with was a leading print advertiser. Some companies
are increasingly turning to online advertising brokers, but only paying
for promising leads on new customers. Brokers eschew print media in favor
of more targeted and efficient "local search" advertising.

The second criterion is whether or not an acquisition plugs a capability
gap, particularly related to employing new business models. Most newspaper
Web sites remain almost entirely reliant on classified listings and
display advertising. Serving new advertisers requires behavioral and
demographic marketing that many newspaper companies lack. Lead generation
is another example. Autobytel generates almost 70% of its revenue from
leads it provides to auto dealers. Many newspaper sites do not even have
this as a product offering.

Through these first two lenses, the recent acquisitions like Topix appear
promising. Not only do these companies have large audiences, they provide
newspapers with new business models and access to segments where online
brokers are actively participating.

Finally, there is the issue of post-acquisition integration. Companies
oftentimes unintentionally destroy the very asset they were hoping to
acquire when they integrate it too closely with the parent organization.
Therefore, our third question is: Does the acquirer recognize that
reaching nonconsumers and leveraging new implied business models requires
substantial autonomy from the core print business, even while efforts are
made to transfer those capabilities into the newspaper?

It's still too early to answer that third question for the recent slate of
mergers. But along the first two dimensions, much of the activity appears
promising. While these deals (ironically) are getting less ink than
mega-mergers in industries such as oil and medical devices, they have a
greater chance of letting incumbent firms sail through turbulent waters.
The key now will be for newspapers to manage those acquisitions
effectively so they continue to grow in new directions.

Mr. Gilbert is a professor at Harvard Business School. Mr. Anthony is a
partner at Innosight LLC.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113142165259390911.html

# posted by newshare @ 1:58 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

QUOTE: Robert Fisk on American journalism's failure to challenge authority

On November 9, 2005, Amy Goodman, the host of the weekday U.S. news program "Democracy Now!" interviewed Robert Fisk, author of "The Great War for Civilization," and a veteran war correspondent. Fisk has written for the London Independent, and is based in Beirut, Lebanon. Goodman asked Fisk for his views on the American press, and in particular a decision by the editors of The Washington Post not to give the names of two nation's where it is alleged the United States takes political prisoners for torture. Here is a transcript of that portion of the interview, as provided by Democracy Now!.

FROM:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/09/1538226

AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of the Washington Post exposing a secret C.I.A. prison in Eastern Europe, and yet complying with the Pentagon's request?

ROBERT FISK: Yes, but they wouldn't say where they were, would they? In fact, the prisons are about 100 miles from Warsaw in Poland and also quite a considerable way from Bucharest, but in Romania. It was very amusing to find that the Washington Post would not say that Poland and Romania were the two countries involved, and most American journalists have fought shy of saying that. But Poland and Romania are the two democracies where these people are taken for torture by the C.I.A.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you make of them complying with the Pentagon request not to name the countries?

ROBERT FISK: Well, this is the same problem that's existed all along with American journalism. And that is this osmotic, parasitic relationship between the press or journalists, in general, and power, where to criticize your country's foreign policy, especially when it's war, is seen as a form of unpatriotic behavior and thus of potential subversion. Add to this the sort of American school of journalism, where everyone has to have 50% of each story, each side, which is ridiculous. The victims should be the subject of the story if we have any kind of compassion at all as human beings. When we reach this stage, I think, you know, journalism ceases to perform its function.

What we should be doing is challenging authority, which is what Helen [Thomas] was trying to do in that clip we just saw from the White House press conference. But if you want to see the normal White House press conference, you'll quickly see the relationship between the journalist and the President. It will be "Mr. President! Mr. President! Mr. President!". And then George W. Bush will say, "John," "Amy," "Bob," whoever it might be, right? That is the relationship that exists now, and it should be much more combative. You know, Amira Hass, the very fine Israeli journalist, a friend of mine, we were discussing the purpose of being a foreign correspondent about two years or so ago, and I was going on about, you know, "We write the first pages of history," in my Brit way. And she said, "No, Robert, our job is to monitor the centers of power." And we don't do that.

# posted by newshare @ 10:56 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Legislation may affect future of public-access television

A SECOND STORY AT:
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/10/1773893.php

BELOW FROM:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/arts/television/08cabl.html

Proposed Legislation May Affect Future of Public-Access Television
Published: November 8, 2005

By FELICIA R. LEE
The New York Times

One recent afternoon, in a small brownstone dwarfed by the shine and
sprawl of the nearby Time Warner Center in Midtown Manhattan, Joel
Igartua got ready for his close-up. The 18-year-old high school senior
was honing his interview skills and mastering video camera basics to
make public service announcements for Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a
public-access television station.

"People should have the right to make their own shows," Mr. Igartua
said. "TV is powerful. Everyone watches TV."

For every hour of "Desperate Housewives" on ABC, the nation's 3,000
public-access television channels present dozens of hours of local
school board meetings, Little League games and religious services. Not
to mention programs like "The Great Grown-Up Spelling Bee," a spelling
bee for adults that raises money for the Kalamazoo, Mich., public
library, and "Fruta Extrena," a bilingual gay talk show in New York
City.

Now, though, the future of the channels deemed "electronic soapboxes"
in 1972 by the Federal Communications Commission is uncertain, as
proposed legislation about how the telecommunications industry is
regulated winds its way through Congress.

The main concern for public-access advocates is that the law preserve
the ability of municipalities to negotiate franchise agreements for
cable television. Those agreements pay for the public-access programs
and allow municipalities to determine how many channels they want and
allow public access programmers like Manhattan Neighborhood Network to
train nonprofit groups to produce their own shows. The proposed
legislation varies in its specifics, but several bills aim to allow
more video-services competition - easing the way for telephone
companies to compete for the franchises - and minimize regulations for
franchises. Advocates of the legislation say that the fears of the
demise of public access are exaggerated and that some local control of
franchises is written into the bills.

Currently, most cable franchise agreements include a franchise fee paid
by cable providers for using city property, putting millions of dollars
in city coffers, some of which can be used for public-access channels.
Some agreements also provide explicit financing and support for the
community's use of the cable system. Public, educational and government
- or "PEG" - access channels tend to be uneven in their quality and
production values. But, say advocates, these shows are not meant to
sell products or just entertain, but to mirror community interests and
needs.

"There has to be some portion of the system open to public use, which
has public revenue supporting it," Anthony T. Riddle, executive
director of the Washington-based Alliance for Community Media, said of
his advocacy of public access. The group represents 1,000 media centers
nationwide.

Yesterday, to take advantage of election eve, thousands of
public-access channels nationwide were scheduled to show one minute of
video snow simultaneously to protest the legislative proposals,
beginning at 9 p.m., Eastern time. The alliance is joined by the
National League of Cities and the United States Conference of Mayors in
opposing any bill that would strip local control of cable franchises.
Public-access advocates are appealing to politicians and to the public
to hear their case.

The cable business has $60 billion in revenue annually, and last year
cable operators paid $2.4 billion in franchise fees, according to the
National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the cable industry's
principal trade association.

Under federal law, cities can collect a franchise fee that is up to 5
percent of the gross revenue generated from the delivery of cable
services.

With 33,000 local cable franchises across the country, telephone
companies are now pressuring the federal government for speedier access
to franchises and fewer restrictions. In Texas
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/
usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/texas/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>
recently, SBC and Verizon got that state to set up a uniform
clearing-house approach, meaning that these companies can apply to the
state for franchises and do not have to negotiate agreements with each
municipality separately.

"One of the big questions is, Is there a place for public interest in
our media policy, or is it one size fits all?" said Rick Junger, the
director of community media at Manhattan Neighborhood Network.

The National Cable and Telecommunications Association has not weighed
in on any specifics of the proposed laws because it is too early, said
a spokesman for the association, Rob Stoddard. The organization's
concern, he said, is that any new rules on franchises apply to all
video providers, whether they are traditional cable providers or
telephone companies.

What advocates hope is not lost in all the fights over politics and
technology is their idea of public access as a First Amendment right,
especially for people and towns underrepresented on television. The
local franchise agreements, they said, have provided a tried and true
mechanism to handle customer complaints, determine local programming
needs and deliver the money to produce those programs.

Mr. Riddle said that the groups he represents produced 20,000 hours of
new programs a week, using 1.2 million volunteers and 250,000 community
groups in any given year. That's more programming, he added, than the
broadcast networks combined.

"It's where we turn for a sense of self," Laurie Cirivello, executive
director of the Community Media Center of Santa Rosa, said of the four
access channels in her Northern California community of 150,000. The
channels feature locally produced shows like "Mrs. Twizzleton's Magic
Garden," a children's program with a local psychologist as host, and a
number of Spanish-language shows.

Ms. Cirivello noted that Santa Rosa, near San Francisco, has no local
television stations.

Legislators say their bills are needed because the current
telecommunication laws did not foresee the Internet explosion, or new
video technology like telephone service over the Internet, and
interactive television.

The Video Choice Act, introduced in the House by Marsha Blackburn,
Republican of Tennessee
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/
usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/tennessee/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>,
has been referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The
Senate version, introduced by Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/
usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/oregon/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>,
and Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/
usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/westvirginia/index.html?inline=nyt-
geo>, has been referred to the Senate Commerce, Science and
Transportation Committee. In the Senate, a bill introduced by John
Ensign, Republican of Nevada
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/
usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/nevada/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>,
which covers a broader range of telecommunications issues, is known as
the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act.

"This legislation allows consumers - not government bureaucrats - to
choose the best services at the best prices," Senator Ensign said in an
e-mail message. The Ensign bill, now also in the Senate Commerce,
Science and Transportation Committee, has drawn the most fire from
opponents, who say the House and Senate versions of the Video Choice
Act are more flexible in their language.

"It is just flat wrong to say we eliminate public, educational and
government channels," Senator Ensign said. "Our bill specifically
requires video providers to carry up to four PEG channels."

He said his bill did not eliminate the 5 percent franchise fee. It
extends it, he said, to new video providers and also has an entire
section protecting the ability of state and local governments to manage
their rights of way.

Representative Blackburn said that her bill was intended to create more
affordable video options and more diversity in programming. "My bill
seeks to keep limitations and regulations to a minimum in order to
encourage an active, growing marketplace rather than the atrophied one
we have right now," she said in an e-mail message.

But public-access advocates argue that these are empty words and that
questions remain, including those concerning how franchise fees are
defined and who oversees the collection of right-of-way revenue.
Senator Ensign's aides acknowledged that the definition of "revenue"
for franchise fees was still debatable. Whether revenue from purchases
on a home shopping channel should be included, as they currently are,
is one question that has to be answered, an aide to Senator Ensign
said. The Ensign bill also caps the number of access channels at four
in each municipality, although some big cities already have more. New
York City, for example, has nine PEG channels.

Ralph Engelman, the chairman of the journalism department at Long
Island University's Brooklyn campus, said, "The whole concept is a
somewhat radical, democratic vision - giving ordinary citizens access
to the most persuasive communications medium that exists." He added:
"It's incredibly diverse, and it's very raw. It's probably a better
reflection of what our society is than mainstream television."

The personalities from public access sometimes even make it onto
mainstream television. RuPaul, the cross-dressing entertainer, kicked
off his career in 1982 on a weekly public-access show in Atlanta called
"The American Music Show."

----------------------------------------------------------------

# posted by newshare @ 2:21 PM 0 comments

Saturday, November 05, 2005

BLOGS: Blogs defined -- will they ever become vessels for journalism?

ORIGINAL SOURCE:
http://flathat.wm.edu/story.php?issue=2005-11-04&type=3&aid=1

POSTED: Sat Nov 5 2005

Are blogs just web journals or a new form of journalism?

By ALEJANDRO SALINAS
FLAT HAT VARIETY EDITOR

Kevin Federline, Britneys dancing ape of a husband, has once again become a public laughing stock granting Tara Reid a
nice sabbatical from the full-time job. The latest from K-Fed: a couple of music tracks recorded by the dancer that,
apparently, not even Brit herself could digest with a straight face. The album was leaked on the internet and, Stereogum,
a gossipy and savagely humorous music blog, had the skinny: a sample of Yall aint ready, K-Feds first single.

Stereogum, with its sharp commentary, witty banter and exclusive (and often illegal) content, is just one of the many
examples illustrating the rapid expansion and emerging influence of blogs. According to Forbes online edition which,
incidentally, selected Stereogum as one of the best music blogs there are currently over 14 million blogs online, and the
growth rate is that of about 1,200 per day.

Started as personal online journals think livejournal, xanga, myspace, xuqa, etc. blogs (short for weblogs) have become
an influential medium, seeping into every aspect of society. There are blogs dedicated to sophisticated albeit partisan
political discussions (www.tpmcafe.com). There are blogs dedicated exclusively to puppetry (puppetvision.blogspot.com).
There are blogs for the literary-inclined (www.mediabistro.com/galleycat), and there are blogs for those who just really
like kites (steadywinds.com). In fact, the blogospheres presence is such, that the word blog officially made it to the
Oxford English Dictionary in 2003.

Though its defined as a frequently updated website or online journal typically run by a single person, this is becoming
less and less the case as more blogs continue to cement their presence and begin to rival other established forms of
media. While countless online blogs are essentially rubbish, a select number have cultivated large followings and are
accomplishing the unexpected: generating revenue through advertising. Many of these sites, like magazines and newspapers,
are currently run by a staff and even attract special contributors such as Senator and former vice-presidential candidate
John Edwards. The latest example of the growing economic clout of the blogosphere? America Online Inc.s recent purchase
of 85 blogging sites owned by Weblogs Inc. The deal, meant to boost AOLs blog presence on the internet, is estimated at
$25 million.

Realizing the power of expression blogs offer to the public, large newspapers and magazines across the country have and
continue to develop sections on their websites dedicated exclusively to this feature. The Stranger, Seattles alternative
newspaper, has a specific forum, the SLOG, on which its staff members and columnists post entries on a regular basis. The
Washington Post does something similar: though the papers website does not have a blog section of its own, almost every
article is accompanied by links to numerous outside blogs discussing similar or related topics.
The Stranger and The Posts move for integration reflects the growing concern most traditional forms of media are
experiencing as blogs begin to compete for market share.

A blogs immediate nature, alongside the possibility of interactivity, make it an attractive medium for those interested
in finding reactions to happenings of the day. Additionally, a blogs forum style far less restrictive than most print
journals and newspapers can also play a significant role in attracting readers.

Yet, while the lack of stylistic restrictions might make blogs attractive to some people, their general lack of any sort
of regulation or set of guidelines brings up an important issue: credibility. Unlike magazines, newspapers and other
sorts of media, blogs can present (in this case, post) any kind of information, regardless of its veracity. With no ones
reputation on the line, bogus stories can easily emerge.

Distinguishing between the real and the concocted in blogs becomes almost impossible, as Paul Ford, an editor for Harpers
Magazine, recently demonstrated. In an article in The New York Times, Ford revealed himself to be the creator of Gary
Benchley, a fictitious character whose blog about a passionate desire to join an indie rock band had attracted a large
number of readers. Many of these readers, including a Times editor who had invited Benchley to consider writing for the
paper, had no idea Benchley was a fabrication of Ford.

In addition to issues of accuracy, blogs can and have easily become forums for flagrant personal attacks and political
bashing.

For better or worse, blogging functions in democratic fashion, allowing everyone to voice their opinion and placing power
and authority once exclusive to the press into the hands of the general public. Still in its infancy, it remains to be
seen whether blogging will develop into a new, more engaging form of journalism with an immediate and (hopefully)
accurate feedback loop, or if it will just end up as another vehicle for people to (justifiably) mock poor, dumb K-Fed.

# posted by newshare @ 7:29 AM 0 comments

Friday, November 04, 2005

Chicago Media Reform Group Files Sweeping TV License Renewal Challenge

A Chicago-based volunteer media watchdog is challenging the licenses
of nine TV station's in the nation's second-largest city on the
grounds they do not give enough airtime to news about civic affairs.
Chicago Media Action said it filed its petition with the Federal
Communications Commission on Nov. 1, 2005. The complete petition is at:
www.chicagomediaaction.org/pdffiles/2005petition.pdf

------------------------

BELOW is a news release provided by Steve Macek,
one of the volunteers at Chicago Media Action.

CHICAGO MEDIA REFORM GROUP FILES FCC PETITION TO DENY RENEWAL OF ALL
COMMERCIAL TV STATION LICENSES IN CHICAGO

GROUP CITES STATIONS' SYSTEMATIC FAILURE TO COVER STATE AND LOCAL
ELECTIONS

Washington, D.C., Nov. 1, 2005 -- Lawyers for media reform group Chicago
Media Action (CMA) filed a formal petition with the Federal Communication
Commission requesting that it deny the pending license renewal
applications of nine Chicago television stations. The petition charges
that the stations in question -- WBBM, WMAQ, WLS, WGN, WCIU, WFLD, WCPX,
WSNS and WPWR -- fell far short of their obligations to serve the public
interest by failing to provide adequate coverage of local and state
elections during the 2004 campaign.

Under the terms of their licenses, television broadcasters are required to
serve the public interest, convenience and necessity. Stations must renew
their licenses every eight years, at which time citizens can file
objections with the FCC. All of the television licenses in the state of
Illinois are up for renewal this year. If the FCC grants CMA's petition,
the license renewals for the nine stations would be subject to
a hearing, at least part of which would be held in or near Chicago.

Chicago Media Action's petition cites a study of locally produced news
programming conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in
support of its claims about the lack coverage of local elections in 2004.

Based on a systematic review of all news and public affairs programming
aired by the five highest-rated stations in the Chicago media market, the
CMPA study found that just 7.8 percent of the station's newscasts during
the last month of the 2004 campaign focused on elections. Some 79
percent of that election reporting dealt exclusively with the
Presidential and Senate races. By contrast, U.S. House races accounted
for just four percent of the stations' election coverage and Illinois
House races accounted for less than one percent.

CMA's lawyer, Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Washington, DC-based public
interest law firm Media Access Project, remarked, "The FCC has repeatedly
affirmed the importance of broadcasters' service to the local community.
It's impossible to reconcile this emphasis on localism with the paucity of
local election coverage available to Chicago voters."

"These broadcasters get to use the public airwaves for free and rake in
millions of dollars every year in advertising revenue," explained CMA
board member Mitchell Szczepanczyk. "The least they can do in return is
provide us with the news and information we need as citizens. Yet
television news in Chicago consistently ignores state and local politics.
Last year, for instance, WGN-TV did not air a single story about the many
hotly contested races for the Illinois State Legislature. It's a
disgrace. They simply don't deserve to stay on the air."

The document filed by CMA was not the only complaint the FCC received this
week against Chicago's television outlets. Also on Tuesday, Third Coast
Press, a Chicago-based community newspaper and website, submitted a
"petition to deny" of its own one that challenged the license renewal
applications of the city's commercial television stations as well as
public broadcasters WTTW and WYCC on the grounds that, among other
things, the stations' news programming marginalized the voices of anti-war
activists in the lea*up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

ABOUT CHICAGO MEDIA ACTION. Chicago Media Action (CMA) is a Chicago
area-group dedicated to analyzing and broadening Chicago's major media and
to building Chicago s independent media. In 2004, CMA issued a
widely-covered study of bias on WTTW's nightly news show, "Chicago
Tonight." For more information about CMA, visit
www.chicagomediaaction.org

For a copy of the CMA's petition, complete with supporting documents,
please visit www.chicagomediaaction.org/pdffiles/2005petition.pdf

*30--

Steve Macek, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Speech Communication
North Central College
30 N. Brainard
Naperville, IL 60540-4690
Phone: 630-637-5369
Fax: 630-637-5140

Webpage: http://stephen.macek.faculty.noctrl.edu/
Blog: http://stevemacek.blogspot.com/

CONTACTS:
Washington, DC:
Andrew Jay Schwartzman (President, Media Access Project)
202-232-4300
andys@mediaaccess.org

Chicago:
Mitchell Szczepanczyk (Chicago Media Action)
773-753-0818
mitchell@chicagomediaaction.org

# posted by newshare @ 3:52 PM 0 comments

NEWSPAPERS: Making the inside of newsrooms as big as outside

Subject: Edward Cone: Making inside of newsroom as big as outside

Posted: 1-30-05

By Edward Cone
Greensboro, [N.C.] News & Record

In the final book of "The Chronicles of Narnia," there is a
description of a building that is bigger inside than it is outside.
That's how I see traditional journalism in the age of the Internet.
Whenever I think I've mapped its new contours, somebody shows me
another wing.

I arrived at a recent conference on journalism and the Web confident I
knew a thing or two about the subject. I was there as an ambassador
from Greensboro, our fair city being the subject of some national
scrutiny as a laboratory for new kinds of journalism, and I sang for
my supper by rapping about the proliferation of Web logs and online
communities within this newspaper and beyond it.

And certainly Greensboro was relevant to the conversation and of
particular interest to the empiricists in the group. Alex Jones, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who is now a lecturer at Harvard's
Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, asked me
if The New York Times could possibly emulate the News & Record. That's
a question last posed, well, never.

Meanwhile Jill Abramson, managing editor of the Times, listened as
journalists and bloggers suggested ways her paper can adjust to the
Web. None of those ways, despite a common misconception about the
changes afoot in the practice of journalism that seemed to pervade
even some corners of the conference room at Harvard, involve replacing
with blog-wielding amateurs such valuable assets as, say, the Baghdad
bureau maintained by The Paper Formerly Known as Of Record. Instead we
heard strategies for using technology to tap the brains and creativity
of more people than the Times bureau alone could ever employ, and then
feeding this input back through the paper's great editorial machinery
to produce a better brand of journalism.

This idea that there is more knowledge outside the newsroom than in
it, that as writer Dan Gillmor puts it, "my readers know more than I
do," is of course the point of bothering to report stories in the
first place. What's new is the ability of individuals to publish their
own words, as well as audio and video, cheaply and easily on the Web.
Experts and eyewitnesses are no longer consigned to audience status.
They don't have to wait to be interviewed by professionals but can
push information out at their own discretion.

The Web logs and online public spaces staked out by the News & Record
and by local community sites like Greensboro101.com are manifestations
of this trend, ways of making the inside of the building larger than
its physical parameters. But the thing about a distributed revolution
is that it's so darn distributed. At the conference (which was called
Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility) I was reminded that what we are
doing here is just part of the big story happening across the Web.

One straightforward example of opening the newsroom to the
intelligence of its community came from Minnesota Public Radio, where
a database of thousands of listeners is polled via e-mail to gather
information for stories, which can now be assembled from a depth of
research unthinkable with conventional reporting techniques. A
presentation on the syndicated audio files known as podcasts -- the
name derives from the iPods on which many listeners receive the files
-- underscored the need for traditional radio organizations to
innovate if they are going to survive in an era when anyone with Web
access can create and distribute programming.

Then there was Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia, a collaborative
online encyclopedia written and edited on the Web by thousands of
people around the world (wikis are software that allow groups to work
together online). The free encyclopedia is trustworthy, huge,
multilingual and growing, and is produced for only a fraction of what
gets spent by traditional competitors. Now Wales, who spoke about the
culture that has evolved to make such an open project possible, is
launching a collaborative news service called Wikinews. It made me
wonder what a wiki history of Greensboro, or a wiki hub for ACC
basketball, might look like.

What media organizations, including the News & Record, are trying to
figure out is how to add value to this flood of personal publishing
without being drowned by it. Even as the new media enhances the old,
it has some very disruptive possibilities. While Rick Kaplan,
president of MSNBC, said at the conference that Web logs actually
increase the ratings of his programs, online services such as Craig's
List and Monster are already eating away at the ad revenue that pays
for things like that Times bureau in Baghdad. Meanwhile the new media
players are trying to figure out revenue models of their own.

It's going to take some innovative thinking -- there was clamor at the
conference to make all media archives available for free online, for
example -- to preserve what's worth keeping in the existing structure
and to keep the buildings from exploding from the pressure of the
vastness they suddenly can contain.

That Narnian stable as described by C.S. Lewis is an allegory for
heaven, but despite a theological reference to the omniscience of the
global network made at the conference by the journalist Christopher
Lydon (which led, inevitably, to a side conversation on William
Gibson's "Neuromancer"), my claim for the Web is considerably more
modest. It is merely remaking the information business and fitting the
outside into the inside of the media establishment, but that still
seems pretty miraculous to me.

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column
for the News & Record most Sundays.

# posted by newshare @ 2:53 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Wikipedia may go to print, says founder - Yahoo! News

Wikipedia may go to print, says founder - Yahoo! News

Back to Story - Help
Wikipedia may go to print, says founder By Paul Holmes
Mon Oct 31, 8:23 PM ET

Entries from Wikipedia, the popular free online encyclopedia written and edited by Internet users, may soon be available in print for readers in the developing world, founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday.

He said content from the Web site may also be burned onto CDs and DVDs so computer users in places like Africa, who lack access to high-speed Internet, could consult parts of the reference work offline.

Wales also described as incorrect reports, one of them from Reuters, that certain pages of the Wikipedia could be subject to tightened controls or "frozen" for good to prevent vandals and pranksters from tampering with them.

"We are talking to several agents and publishers about what they would be interested in," Wales said of the book project.

He cited health, football and histories of World War Two or rock 'n' roll as examples of how entries could be grouped into subjects.

"I have always liked the idea of going to print because a big part of what we are about is to disseminate knowledge throughout the world and not just to people who have broadband," Wales said by telephone from St. Petersburg, Florida.

Issues like funding, distribution and topics were still being discussed but a first printed work could be ready from mid-2006, he added.

Wales, a 39-year-old former options trader, set up Wikipedia in 2001. The site operates through the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization that relies on donations to pursue its goal of spreading knowledge for free.

The reference work uses "Wiki" software, which gives anyone with access to the Internet the opportunity to edit any page.

NO PLANS TO FREEZE PAGES

Some 350,000 people have contributed terms, background, context or simply corrected spellings for more than 2 million Wikipedia entries in more than 25 active languages. About 800,000 entries are in English.

Wales, an American, said a core group of around 2,000 contributors did the bulk of the work and formed the backbone of the Wikipedia "community."

In August, Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper quoted Wales as saying that "controls" could be tightened to protect potentially sensitive pages of Wikipedia. Reuters picked up the report and, in translating sections of it, said some pages could be "frozen" in perpetuity.

"The idea that we are going to tighten our editorial 'rules' is completely not correct (and) the articles would not be frozen in perpetuity," Wales said. He said he had been misinterpreted and mistranslated.

Wales said new software would be deployed from the end of the year that would allow changes to very active pages which might be prone to vandalism to appear on the site with a time delay, so members of the community could review them.

Enthusiasts had also been discussing whether to create "stable" versions of certain pages that would stand as the most recent reliable entry on a given topic. These would be available behind the latest contributed version and would also be updated as necessary, Wales said.

Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

----------------------------------------------------------------

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# posted by newshare @ 10:55 PM 0 comments

Media Giraffe Project -- Link & reference blog

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

RESEARCH: Youth using Internet to engage in civic affairs, Wisconsin study finds

EDUCATION: British duo launches international web-based PDF paper for kids over 9

AUDIO: eDemocracy simplified, by Steven Clift

AUDIO: Will NPR's podcasts birth a new business model for public radio?

Monday, November 28, 2005

Toronto Star columnist on putting journalism ahead of profits

RESOURCE: Independent Media marketplaces for books, videos sold from new COA News website

Feisty dialog or comfortable cocoons? CBS News exec considers journalism future

OPINION: Mainstream media not under corporate control, CBS news chief says

Sunday, November 27, 2005

FIRST AMENDMENT: Comcast aiming to control the content it delivers?

NETWORK NEUTRALITY: After Brand X, advocacy groups making it a top priority

NETWORK NEUTRALITY: Washington Post story details lobbying effort by "pipe" owners to restrict content on Internet

Saturday, November 26, 2005

BLOGS/ADVERTISING: As Corporate Ad Money Flows Their Way, Bloggers Risk Their Rebel Reputation - New York Times (fwd)

ADVERTISING: Blogs become locations for new advertising

Friday, November 25, 2005

BLOGS: FEC finds a blog covering public policy is not subject to regulation

Thursday, November 24, 2005

GOVERNANCE: Knight-Ridder "alumni" seek board slate

Craigslist founder says he's helping news recommendation service

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

CONCEPT: Comparing today's blog-driven media to America's colonial press

TECHNOLOGY: Google donates $3 million to "American Memory" digitized Library of Congress materials

NEWSPAPERS: Editor lists 10 reasons why they'll survive

BUSINESS MODEL: Non-profit newspaper starts in rural Minnesota

FUTURE: Liberal blogger hiring two reporters for muckraking

Monday, November 21, 2005

FUTURE/NEWSPAPERS: Is Google Base a mortal threat to newspaper classifieds?

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Online Journalism Review: FLICKR, BuzzNet expand citizen journalism

Thursday, November 17, 2005

FUTURE: What will people use "Google Base" for?

AUDIO: PBS Newshour story about citizen journalism -- 11-16-05

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Online Newshour (PBS): The "We Media" Phenomena -- Nov. 16, 2005

NEWSPAPERS: Web usage grows while print circulation drops

Google Base service goes live -- are classifieds a target?

BLOGS: What defines "citizen journalism" -- advertising?

BLOG: "Pajama Media" preparing for Nov 16 launch and new name (fwd)

ADVERTISING: NYTimes -- Web advertising gives small-town retailers new lease on life

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

BLOGS/BUSINESS: Arizon State professor says some blogs are making money

VIDEO: Video BlogDebate: Left vs. Right Biased Journalism?

Monday, November 14, 2005

Sunday, November 13, 2005

BLOGS: Business must pay attention to many more sources

BUSINESS MODELS: How well will pay-on-demand for content personalization work, columnist asks?

EDUCATION: What is "media-literacy education"? A backgrounder

Saturday, November 12, 2005

FIRST AMENDMENT: Lecture by Patrick Butler, Washington Post

NYTimes Nocera column: Trying to Wean Internet Users from Free

Ex-Post editor describes failure of press-government relationship

Thursday, November 10, 2005

NEWSPAPER FUTURES: Companies' acquisitions suggest effort to cope

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

QUOTE: Robert Fisk on American journalism's failure to challenge authority

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Legislation may affect future of public-access television

Saturday, November 05, 2005

BLOGS: Blogs defined -- will they ever become vessels for journalism?

Friday, November 04, 2005

Chicago Media Reform Group Files Sweeping TV License Renewal Challenge

NEWSPAPERS: Making the inside of newsrooms as big as outside

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

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