Posts from ‘September, 2006’

(The following column first appeared in PR Week (subscription required).) My friend David Weinberger, an author and deep thinker, once updated the famous Andy Warhol line for the era of the blog. Weinberger said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people.” Fame is double-edged, of course. So an addendum: In the future, […]

In this Contra Costa Times story, “Judge seals files in MediaNews trial,” you’ll find a priceless and all-too-true line: “Newspapers believe the public should know about everything, unless it is information about newspapers,” Shulman said. The traditional media business is beginning to show signs of transparency, but only beginning. This case is a great example […]

Bob Cox, in ‘The best test of truth’, makes the case that free speech, one of America’s core values, should be one of our chief cultural exports in an often hostile world. It’s an eloquent essay. He makes one small error, though, when he says the right to free speech “does not extend to shouting […]

Bloggers get up close and personal with the arrival of the former prime minister of Iran in Harvard Square, Cambridge: The Secret Service agents were on high alert. Numerous agents emerged from the cars and surrounded the front of the hotel, with guns drawn, sweeping back and forth over the crowd that quickly came to […]

I’ve been sitting in the Atlanta airport for the past several hours in an airline lounge, where the TV is tuned to a “news” network that has been droning on incessantly about a college-cafeteria shooting in Montreal. But wait: There’s breaking news — a hostage situation in Chicago! Then it’s back to Montreal. Are these […]

The New York Times discusses “The Lonelygirl That Really Wasn’t” but skirts the ethical questions — including the fact that the site in question was deceiving people, and that the creators plainly hope to make money on the people they’ve deceived. Isn’t that — at least as much the smart forensic work that exposed the […]

The San Antonio News Express quotes Dallas Morning News Editor and President Robert W. Mong Jr. as follows: “Revenues at major metros in the last five or six years have been fairly flat,” Mong said. “Our news staff is the largest in the Southwest and we went through an involuntary reduction in October of 2004. […]

Wired News notes the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with Birth of the Blog, an observation that blogging got its biggest boost with that tragedy. Indeed it did. The attacks and their impact on media were integral to my 2004 book, We the Media. I was in Africa when the attacks occurred, and followed […]

As noted in an earlier posting, the Sunlight Foundation has awarded us one of its “Transparency Grants” for a test in California. As the foundation noted, we intend to develop an Election Year Demonstration Project for citizen journalism in one Congressional district. CCM will oversee the creation of a website that will seek to cover […]

LA Times: Lonelygirl15’s revelation: It’s all just part of the show. After amateur sleuths uncovered apparent links between the Creative Artists Agency and the official lonelygirl15 MySpace page, a statement claiming to be from “The Creators” was posted on the lonelygirl15 website late Thursday. It read in part: “Our intention from the outset has been […]