Media
Media
MGP2006 : Finding a new definition of Journalism.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/29/2006 - 10:44“Journalism is really conversation among citizens”
Tom Rosenstiel talks about public houses and how people would log what they had seen on their way to the public houses, and others would come and read those logs.
Liveblogging the Media Giraffe Summit Thursday morning.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/29/2006 - 09:31First talk this morning is by Steven Grey, executive director of the American Press Institute’s “Newspaper Next” initiative.
It is a one-year $2.7 million project of API, in partnership with Dr. Clayton Christensen, Innosight, LLC. It’s goal is to help the newspaper industry diversify.
Liveblogging the Media Giraffe Project.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 06/28/2006 - 20:59Dinner has ended, Helen Thomas has spoken briefly, and now, members of the panel are making their initial comments. I’ve set up an IRC channel, irc://irc.freenode.net/mgp2006 where people can get together and talk about the conference. Paul Bass has written a post about Helen’s first talk. For more information about Wednesday's talk click on read more. To read entries about other sessions, click on media.
Micro-Journalism and the Irish Potato Famine
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/19/2006 - 15:54(Cross posted at Greater Democracy.)
Everyone has different phrases to talk about new trends in journalism that have been enabled by the Internet: Citizen Journalism, Hyper Local Journalism, Stand Alone Journalism, and so on. It is hard to keep them all straight.
So, instead of helping clarify things, let me add a new idea to the mix, Micro-Journalism. The idea comes from micro-breweries. The argument for micro-breweries was best presented to me in the quote from “A River Runs Through It”: What a wonderful world it was once when all the beer was not made in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or St. Louis.
People got tired of all the same old beer. People started making beer in their homes, Citizen Brewing. They formed companies to make beer for their local community, hyper local brewing. The idea has spread to other finely crafted products, whether you are talking about wine, jelly beans, ice cream, or, as I just read about yesterday, New England Vodkas. Perhaps fine, hand crafted, local journalism is no different.
People have gotten tired of tasting news from a major cable network, or a national chain of newspapers. They want something with a little more individualism, a little more local flavor.
So, what does this have to do with the Irish Potato Famine? In the early nineteenth century, Irish farmers were forced to grow the highest yielding potatoes, independent of any flavor advantages or hybrid vigor. The lack of hybrid vigor, which is a grave danger of monocultures, allowed a fungus to wipe out much of the potato crop.
Today, a growing dissatisfaction with the universally bland pabulum, spiced only with occasional disasters and depravity, could well be the fungus that is threatening media organizations. The high yield of going back to a small set standard sources instead of doing the hard work of investigative reporting and nurturing new sources is compounding this monoculture.
FBI, CLP, MBA and EFF
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/02/2006 - 08:57Over on Connecticut Local Politics, people have posted blog entries under the usernames "Harry Reid" and "Barak [sic] Obama". The Journal Inquirer has a report that “A Hartford lawyer says the FBI has agreed to investigate postings promoting Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's re-election on a popular Connecticut-based Internet "blog" in the names of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.”
There is a long discussion about this over at Connecticut Local Politics. Instead of simply adding another comment to that thread, I thought it was worthwhile to write my own longer blog post about it.
Were people on CLP libeled? Did the posters commit criminal impersonation? Is this an appropriate investigation for the FBI? As a supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I worry about action that could curtail discussions online. As a member of the Media Bloggers Association, I get particularly nervous when I see legal action being pursued against people that blog or in this case comment on blogs.
Does posting under the username of a famous person constitute impersonating that person? Unlike the person from Hartford, I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me as if a "reasonable man" would not believe that the people posting are in fact Harry Reid or Barack Obama. As to whether or not what the person posted constitutes libel, I’ll leave that for courts to decide if it ever gets this far.
A few other things to consider. When I was working on one political blog, one person commented, pretending to be a staffer of a key elected official in Hartford. People from the official’s office called and asked me to take down the post. I pointed out that even if I did take it down it would remain in various records online, such as archive.org or the cache at Google for a long time, and in my opinion it would be better to have a statement from the office that the comment was not from a staffer. They said that they still preferred the comment to be deleted and I reluctantly did so.
In another case, staffers of an elected official did post to a local blog and the blogmaster successfully tracked the post to an office in Washington. This was a pretty clear violation of laws about what government employees can do during their work time from government offices. I don’t know what the final outcome was. I don’t believe any legal action was pursued, but the actions were stopped.
Whether or not there was in fact criminal activity involved in the posts under the usernames “Harry Reid” and “Barak Obama” to CLP, the behavior did seem over the top to me and I do hope that the CLP community finds more constructive ways of dealing with inappropriate content.
