Posts from ‘April, 2006’

The Smithsonian Institution is a museum complex that has been called our national attic, and it is one of the great treasures of American history and life. But in an outrageous deal with a private media company, the Smithsonian has moved down a path that would privatize a vital part of our national cultural commons. […]

Bertrand Pecquerie, in a guess blog posting on CBSNews.com (I’m doing one later this week), sums up: In the U.S., people blog but they don’t vote. Virtual democracy doesn’t seem to have any affect on real democracy. In Europe, we vote (last week’s elections in Italy, for instance, had an 83% voter turnout), but we […]

I’ll be giving the third in a series of talks/conversations — this time will be much more in the seminar style than the previous events — at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. It’ll be Wednesday evening at the center, starting at 7 p.m. There will be beverages and dessert-type munchies. If […]

I’m planning to attend Vloggercon in San Francisco this June. The organizers call this gathering the intersection between media-makers and technology. A space for dialog and interaction. Of creation and collaboration. A media village born on the internet, and making camp for one weekend in San Francisco. See (some of) you there…

Wikipedia has become so popular and influential, that it was the subject of a formal evaluation by Nature magazine in 2005 (and a related dispute by Britannica afterwards). This month, BBC Focus magazine has done a similar comparision with Encarta, Britannica, Infoplease and Wikipedia. While the study is not currently online, Wikipedian Arwel Parry posted […]

Bill Woo, one of the best journalists of the past century and a fine man, died yesterday in Palo Alto, California. He was a friend, and — as many of us who’ve talked since yesterday about him would agree — an inspiration. He was a mentor to several generations of journalists. The newspaper where he […]

I’m heading to Vermont today for a public talk tomorrow evening in Montpelier. It’ll be good to see some old friends.

Over at the Beyond Broadcast 2006 blog, Colin Rhinesmith writes: On May 12th and 13th, The Berkman Center – along with a team of others – is hosting “Beyond Broadcast: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture”. The title assumes that something called “public media” exists – but what is it? You’re encouraged to visit […]

In his Talk to the Newsroom, a useful but extremely limited version of transparency at the New York Times, Executive Editor Bill Keller inadvertently reveals a common failing among today’s journalists when he writes: Perhaps it’s a reporter’s curse, but I seemed to have a gift for seeing both sides of almost every issue. It’s […]

As noted last Friday, we’re going to look deeply into what traditional news organizations are doing to engage their communities (of interest and/or geography) in the journalism process. Here’s an outline, prepared in large part by Olivia Ma at Harvard University, of how we propose to look at this. We’d like to hear your ideas. […]