Cit Media

New Orleans Times-Picayune: LHSAA rescinds block of photo sales. Calling the matter a misunderstanding, Louisiana High School Athletic Association Commissioner Tommy Henry on Tuesday rescinded a policy that sought to block newspapers from selling to the public photographs taken at state athletic championships.

No misunderstanding: As noted yesterday, this was a flat-out attempt to monopolize picture-taking at a public sports event. At least the officials are backing off their untenable position.

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Ben Sheldon: The Future of Cable Access.

I believe that the important part of Cable Access Television is access. Access to:

* media production tools
* media distribution systems
* training to use them
* media literacy education to understand them

And all of this should be within the context of the needs of the local community.

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New Orleans Times-Picayune: News photographers denied access to LHSAA’s girls state tournament. Several newspapers, including The Times-Picayune, were denied access to photograph the state girls high school basketball championships Monday night when they refused to sign a document limiting the right of newspapers to resell their photos to the public.

If I was the editor of one of these newspapers, I’d put a large house advertisement in today’s paper and on the website. It would invite people attending the game to shoot their own pictures, and send them into the paper, which would resell them on a revenue-sharing basis with the photographers.

I’d also encourage parents to shoot pictures and make them available on photo sharing sites such as Flickr. (I couldn’t find any such pictures today from last night’s game.)

Or are the officials of Louisiana High School Athletic Association planning to force all attendees to sign statements that they won’t sell pictures they take? Or ban cameras they don’t control (not that they could do this successfully in any event)?

The athletic association is living in another century. Then again, so are the newspapers.

See also this similar case in Wisconsin.

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For the past several years, in every talk I’ve given about what traditional journalism organizations could do to involve communities in the reporting, I’ve suggested a “Pothole Map” — a mashup where citizens post the location of street potholes.

Bakersfield.com has done it – well, part of what I suggest. The other part would be to ask people to take photos of the potholes and post them along with the locations. (Update: Some potholes do have photos attached.)

Next, connect the map directly to the city government’s street department. Then keep track of which potholes get fixed in what order, and see which neighborhoods get faster service, and how big a pothole has to be to get the city’s attention.

lad to see an organization trying this. Now where’s everyone else?

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OpenCongress “brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the story behind each bill” before the national legislature. Lots of intriguing ideas, and well worth a look.

(Note: One of the site’s funders, the Sunlight Foundation, has provided funding to us for a separate project.)

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Yesterday’s Beyond Broadcast session on the future of public access TV was a valuable conversation. As expected, my earlier suggestion, which I hoped would generate a lively conversation — to phase it out with a blast of training for citizen media creators — wasn’t greeted with universal praise (ahem).

It was definitely lively, and we talked about many different thing. But Colin Rhinesmith, who attended and videotaped things,

would have liked to see more ideas upon which possibly a PEG Internet model could be established. Meaning, what might it look like? Where might its funding sources come from (if not from cable providers)? How might PEG Internet Centers differ from PEG TV Centers? What would this all really look like, feel like, and smell like?

Meanwhile, Danielle Martin took superb notes. Thanks, Danielle!

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Jack Shafer, in “When bad financial news for newspapers is good news for journalism,” thinks the implosion in stock value of newspaper companies — and newspaper sales for well below what they’d have brought only a few years ago — is

potentially good news for journalism. It pops the bubble that had carried newspaper valuation beyond the Van Allen Belt. And by doing so, it presents publishers—and Wall Street—with more rational expectations about what sort of profits the newspaper industry can make without destroying itself.

I’m skeptical. Investors won’t change their fundamental ways. They’ll continue to demand even bigger cuts.

Hard to see a way out of the implosion anytime soon.

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I’m at the Beyond Broadcast conference in Cambridge, Mass., where MIT professor Henry Jenkins, author of the important recent book Convergence Culture, was keynote speaker. I’ll be co-heading a workshop latger about the future of public-access television — the channels on local cable systems that carry locally generated programming, generally by non-professionals. Jason Crow, access coordinator at Cambridge Community Television, is co-leader of the workshop. More on that here.

Blog highlights from Doc Searls.

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Reuters: Egyptian blogger jailed for insulting Islam.

An Alexandria court sentenced an Egyptian blogger to four years in jail on Thursday for insulting both Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Abdel Karim Suleiman, a 22-year-old former law student who has been in custody since November, was the first blogger to stand trial in Egypt for his Internet writings. He was convicted in connection with eight articles he wrote since 2004.

The case is a travesty, but in unfree nations such things are all too common.

Keep in mind that Egypt’s repressive regime has imprisoned others for speaking out. The fact that they’ve done it to a blogger is troubling in its own way, but not precedent-setting.

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Big, big news in journalism today:

First, read this press release from Reuters about the launch of its Reuters Africa site. The mission:

to cover Africa in detail and from all angles, to give a wider sense of the issues and their contexts, and to explore the individual countries and cultures. Reuters Africa will target both those living on the continent, and anyone globally who follows African development, investment and news.

As Rebecca MacKinnon explains, the venerable news agency has “taken an important and trend-setting step” with this move, in part because

it demonstrates Reuters’ commitment to covering Africa not only as a general news story but also as a global business story - to an extent that I have not seen in other global English-language media…

It also

extends the news agency’s commitment to build synergies between the work of Reuters reporters and the work of bloggers from around Africa, who paint a much more diverse and vibrant picture of the continent than mainstream news reporting tends to do.

Global Voices Online is part of that commitment (and Reuters is a funder). A smart partnership is under way here, and the result are likely to be spectacular.

(Note: Rebecca MacKinnon is on this Center’s advisory board, and I’m on the Global Voices advisory board.)

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