Cit Media

Charlie McCollum (San Jose Mercury News): Fox digs deep in the sleaze, comes up with an O.J. Simpson special. Mike Darnell, the head of Fox’s alternative programming department and the man most responsible for bringing “If I Did It” to the airwaves, did say in the release that “this is an interview that no one thought would ever happen.” It’s also an interview that never should have happened — and will leave blood on the hands of everyone involved including those who choose to watch.

If you thought there were depths to which even Fox would not sink, think again.

Is there any way to shame these people? Apparently not.

Seth Finkelstein: Wikipedia, and the difficulties of criticizing digital-sharecropping.

In brief, there’s two important ideas somewhat in conflict:

1) (fact) There are new businesses which can be built on data-mining or large collections of small amounts of unpaid labor

2) (belief) There is social or economic value in openness and commons

Fascinating discussion here, stemming from another debate. Read the comments, too.

A company just emailed me this pitch (in part):

The 2006 Elections are now over, but the excitement continues. With newly elected Members and a change of party control in the House, it is now time for a flurry of changes to leadership positions, committee leadership, committee and subcommittee membership, and staff.

All of the new Members are currently available in the Congressional Leadership Directory® Online. And all other changes will be available as they occur, since the Congressional Leadership Directory® Online is updated daily.

This kind of directory should be created daily by the members themselves — and made public as a matter of routine. Or maybe someone could create a Wiki to keep track of comings and goings.

It’s called The Lede, and I’m still not quite sure what the mission is despite this description:

In the news business, the opening sentences of a story are referred to as its “lede” — spelled that way, journalism lore has it, to avoid confusion with the lead typesetting that once dominated newspaper printing presses. Although a tightly focused narrative typically follows the lede, every sentence in a news story has the potential to spiral off in new directions, and each paragraph leaves behind unexplored angles. That’s where The Lede’s mission begins..

Watching with interest…

Lawyers for YouTube apparently sent lawyers after Techcrunch for an copyright offense that doesn’t sound offensive.

Bozo behavior ascendant.

In a piece for the Washington Examiner, “Small steps forward for Net politics in 2006 campaign,” I ask:

In a world where digital communications can fuel collaborations of all kinds, how can the political class take the Net to the next level?

Peter Scheer, executive of the California First Amendment Coalition, asks, “What if online portals had nothing but ‘digital fish wrap’?” He writes:

Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period — say, 24 hours — after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to remove content from the Internet, but to delay its free release in that venue.

I wish newspapers recognized their value and found ways to make money on it. This isn’t the way.

I’m not a lawyer. But having followed some antitrust cases closely in the past, and having heard today from someone with intimate familiarity with the field, I can say this: The plan as suggested above would very likely run a huge risk of violating antitrust law. And I’d lend my moral support the inevitable lawsuits by Google or Yahoo or whoever else filed them. (The feds, under current management, would probably see nothing wrong with this market manipulation.)

To suggest that part of the newspapers’ woes stem from competition for real-time news reminds me of how the owners of major-league sports franchises pay wildly inflated salaries to the players, and then beg the players to sign collective-bargaining agreements restricting high wages. Real capitalism does not favor idiocy at any level.

I want to save newspapers — or at least the good things they do — as much as anyone else. But creating a cartel-like system, no matter what it was called, would be a cure considerably worse than the disease, not to mention the fact that it wouldn’t work.

(Note: I’m on the board of the California First Amendment Coalition.)

David Carr, NY Times: Dubious Mix: Rich Suitors, Ailing Papers. Each potential buyer of the Tribune papers has said, mostly through surrogates, that profits are not the point, but men who spent their lives piling up money hate to watch it evaporate. And any experienced business reporter will tell you the average titan has little understanding or sympathy for aggressive newsgathering. “They say they are not interested in making money and they are not going to interfere in the editorial process, so what exactly is the deal here?” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee University.

What’s the deal? Several guesses:

First, they see the big local newspaper as an extension of authority. The publisher in any big city has the ear of the power structure in a way that even the richest mogul does not, because even in an era of diminished expectations newspapers still have the power to raise a ruckus. Sure, other media can be influential, but the newspaper — still the main (if poorly used) repository of community history and events — carries weight beyond its actual reach.

Second, and related to the first point, a newspaper is a nifty ego boost. Brian Tierney, the new principal owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, was just a PR guy before — a high-profile and rich PR guy, for sure, but nothing more. Now he’s the owner of the biggest newspaper in town. People are talking about him.

Third, it’s ridiculous to entirely write off newspaper companies. Yes, the business model is under attack. And yes, it won’t be the same business in a few years that it is today. But the lack of innovation — caused by a fundamental lack of imagination inside an industry that used to think selling advertising meant answering the phone — can be fixed by new, smart thinking. Tierney and his colleagues are going to remake the Inquirer, and it will never be the same paper it was. But it could easily become a great local media and journalism company that once again becomes indispensable to the community it serves.

Many, maybe most, of the rich new owners will be out to milk the dying cow, or to use the newspapers as ego-trip vehicles for themselves and their friends. But the ones who are willing to make less money on their investments than Wall Street has been demanding from the publicly held companies, and who see journalism as something to support because it matters — they will help, not hurt, journalism in this new era.

The Independent in London asks:

Is print heading for obsolescence? Or can it re-invent itself and reach out to a generation brought up looking at screens?

Lots of answers from lots of media people. Worth reading.

NY Times: Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

These ideas, which some people are calling Web 3.0, as the story notes, could well be the foundation for one of the Next Big Things in technology. Smart entrepreneurs are working now on making them real.

In the news category, the value of this approach is obvious: sifting through the huge amount of noise and finding the signal, then putting it all together in a coherent (or at least more coherent) whole than we can dream of today. Again, people are working on this, and some may be getting fairly close to a first approximation. But it will be an extremely difficult problem, the kind that tech folks call “nontrivial.”
Then again, the nontrivial problems are worth the most — when they’re solved.