Cit Media

If you’re a blogger or other citizen media creator and plan to cover happenings on Election Day, you may be wondering about some of the legal situations you may encounter.

Ask your questions at the question page for an upcoming Election Day Bloggers’ Legal Guide, and Stanford University Law students will work on getting the answers.

Our students at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism and the School of Information have done an amazing job pulling together the beta version of VoteGuide:

your interactive community participation portal to the (California) 11th Congressional district race. This non-partisan site looks at the issues and information about the candidates with help from you — the voters in the district. We need your help and input to make this site work.

We’ll be soliciting lots of feedback on this project, which is designed to create a template for future elections. If you live in the 11th district or know someone who does, please point them to the page that explains how they can help.

USA Today: Pundit Armstrong Williams settles case over promoting education reforms.

Armstrong Williams says the $34,000 he will repay to the U.S. government is a small price to pay to put a 2-year-old punditry scandal behind him.

Is he joking? This isn’t behind him.

Armstrong Williams will always be known as a classic opinion launderer. He took money for promoting government goals in media outlets that weren’t wise to the arrangement.

It was unethical. This settlement doesn’t address that, and if he thinks this salvages even a shred of his reputation, he’s wrong. Again.

Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post says “Tightened Belts Could Put Press In a Pinch“:

Real investigative reporting, as opposed to the what-happened-yesterday stuff, is time-consuming, risky and expensive. And as one news organization after another sheds staff in this tough financial climate, it’s worth considering what aggressive journalism has produced lately.

Yes, worth considering. But it’s also worth remembering the Big Media aren’t the only places where aggressive journalism occurs.

One, which has been around for a while, is the Center for Public Integrity, which does brilliant investigative journalism. It relies on grants and donations, a business model that has supported terrific stuff.

Another, newer project, is Jay Rosen’s budding NewAssignment.net, which has a chance to help redefine the nature of the investigative project in a networked age.

And let’s not forget that the best reporting on government spying on Americans has been done by that famous journalism organization (not), the American Civil Liberties Union. A new report, based on information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, is an example.

We should worry about the economic implosion that is costing jobs and sapping resources from investigative reporting. But many in the Big Media have been losing their appetite for this for some time.

We need to find ways to move ahead on the assumption that the negative trend will continue.

The ombudsman of the New York Times, in his current column, decides somewhat incoherently, that the paper was wrong to blow the whistle on a semi-secret government spying program targeting, among others, U.S. citizens.

If the job of the press isn’t to tell us when such things are going on, then the press has no job at all.

At the Providence Journal, where a systems glitch made for big problems, Sheila Lennon volunteered:

to stay home and take emails from reporters and editors. I would publish The Providence Journal’s breaking news on the Web by myself all day from our home den, barefoot. I would email headlines, permalinks and timestamps back to the newsroom to be manually posted on the homepage. No one inside the Journal could see any of it.

ASAP

Originally uploaded by lisa.williams.

Derrick Lang, author of The Slug, part of ASAP, an AP initiative to experiment and multimedia and appeal to younger readers:

“This banner up here, I made that in Photoshop; these graphics on the side, I taught myself how to do that in TypePad; I had to teach myself how to do it…we have a lot of excellent audio and video people to help us, but there is no ‘blogging department.’

The story about the the television show Survivor dividing teams by race was broken on Derrik’s blog:

“I heard that maybe they were dividing teams by race, and I thought ‘That’s crazy, there’s no way they’re going to do that. But I called around, and sure enough, they were going to do it.”

During the Q&A afterward, Derrick Currie reveals that the pop culture blog adheres to the AP stylebook, and it is reviewed before it goes out. Sounds heavy. According to Technorati, the blog has 177 people linking to it as I write this; it started in May.
– Heard at the Sharon Johnson Memorial Workshop at the Pennsylvania News Association.

Tom Evslin’s graceful retraction of something he wrote recently helps us understand the changing media scene. Let’s unpack what happened.
In a posting entitled “Networked Citizen Journalists at Work” (including himself), he discussed the way folks peered into a small telecom company’s apparent business model. What prompted them? An item in David Pogue’s New York Times tech blog, which left some unanswered questions. Tom writes:

What’s interesting is that the business model left unexposed in David Pogue’s post was successively peeled back by bloggers with subject matter expertise AND THEIR READERS. And all three bogs ended up linked together through their comments so those who were interested could learn or contribute to the story.

What Tom wrote next was where he erred. He said:

But note that this isn’t all you should expect from journalism. There’s a strong circumstantial case for how the company makes money (which is not a crime although somewhat deceptive). But none of us, professional or amateur, has pressed the company itself for a reply.

Not so, as David Pogue noted in the comments in the original post I made about this, and to Tom himself.

I have a lot of trust in both of these gentlemen. Today I have even more.

At an Internet conference in Hungary during the past (too brief) several days, I met several people who would be standouts in any culture. Their intelligence and curiosity about the world reminded me of something my brother, Wiley, and I have talked about from time to time: Call it the Hungarian Greatness Quotient, perhaps.

Here’s a short list we drew up, for starters, of accomplished native Hungarians from the past century:

Music:
Béla Bartók
Zoltán Kodály
Georg Solti
George Szell
Antal Dorati
Christian Dohnanyi
Eugene Ormandy

Science & Math:
John von Neumann
Theodore von Kármán
Edward Teller
Leó Szilárd
Eugene Wigner
Paul Erdös
John Kemeny
George de Hevesy
Business:
Andy Grove
George Soros

Other:
Erno Rubik
Arthur Koestler
Elie Wiese

I sent a note to Andy Grove, one of the most prominent members of the list. He suggested adding Albert Szentgyorgyi, inventor of Vitamin C, and noted that there’s a book about all this by a Budapest professor, George Marx.

The “Men from Mars” title of this post comes from semi-humorous speculation that the Manhattan Project Hungarians must have come from another planet — they were so brilliant, the theory went, that this was as good an explanation as any for such a small nation producing so much talent. You can learn more in this essay by Marx, derived, I believe, from his book.

What does all this have to do with citizen media? Not much, I grant, but consider the Hungary Page and its giant list of famous Hungarians. If you know of any, you can submit their names, too.

The site is one of those publications that could not have existed before the Web. Now, we can make lists of anything, and everything.

UPDATED

Tom Evslin discusses the operations of some “Networked Citizen Journalists at Work” (including himself) as they peered into a small telecom company’s apparent business model. What prompted them? An item in David Pogue’s New York Times tech blog, which left some obvious unanswered questions. Tom writes:

What’s interesting is that the business model left unexposed in David Pogue’s post was successively peeled back by bloggers with subject matter expertise AND THEIR READERS. And all three bogs ended up linked together through their comments so those who were interested could learn or contribute to the story.

Crucially, he adds:

But note that this isn’t all you should expect from journalism. There’s a strong circumstantial case for how the company makes money (which is not a crime although somewhat deceptive). But none of us, professional or amateur, has pressed the company itself for a reply.

Update: David Pogue, in the comments, says he did press the company for an explanation.