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Posts from ‘March, 2007’

Don't Be April Fooled

Slate’s Jack Shafer offers an April Fool’s Day defense kit, saying, “This year, don’t be taken for a sucker by the media.” I tend not to indulge in these things, but couldn’t resist back in 2000, just as the tech stock bubble was peaking. My friend Michael Schrage and I used my San Jose Mercury […]

Does Anti-Plagiarism Service Violate Copyright Law

Washington Post: McLean Students Sue Anti-Cheating Service. The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin. The service seeks to root out cheaters by comparing student term papers and essays against a database of more than 22 million student papers as well […]

McClatchy-Yahoo Content Deal a Pathbreaker

Howard Weaver, McClatchy’s VP for news, explains in “Foreign correspondence for Yahoo! News” why the deal the companies have made breaks new ground: McClatchy, the country’s third largest newspaper publisher with 31 daily and 50 weekly newspapers and a big Internet portfolio, is going to start providing next-generation international news for some of the Yahoo! […]

Citizen Media Directions, Some Video

JD Lasica points to some excerpts from a public conversation he and I had last week in Palo Alto: Citizen media: Where is it heading? (Hat-tip to Elliot Margolies, director of the Community Media Center for his hospitality and technical work at the event, and for posting the clips. His center is doing amazing work.)

Gaming the Ratings, Net Style

The Personal Democracy Forum’s techPresident site reports convincingly in “YouTube Gets Pwned: Obama’s Numbers Don’t Add Up” that the viewership numbers for an Obama campaign video are being inflated by people gaming the system. It was inevitable, and there’s precedent in the analog media world. Newspaper circulation numbers have been fraudulently hyped, for example. The […]

Comment Spam and Its Consequences

In the past 24 hours this blog has received more than 1,600 comment spams — fake comments with links to the usual sleazy Web operations that pollute the online world. The  spam-control system I use, Akismet, has trapped almost all of the spams, so you won’t be burdened with them. Unfortunately, it’s also possible that […]

German Views on Media Changes

At the Kölner Journalistenschule today in Cologne, Germany, I’ve received a polite but not entirely warm reception in discussing the citizen media shift and its value to the business and economic journalists who are attending this one-day conference. This is not a shock. Germany remains perhaps the most traditional media market in western Europe, and […]

Principles of Journalism, Citizen and Otherwise

This morning we’re happy to announce a new project, “Principles of Citizen Journalism” — a look at the key principles that we believe are at the basis of journalistic work for professionals and non-professionals alike. The project was supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The principles also appear as part of […]

A Publication Passes from Ink-on-Paper to Web

The rumors were true. Infoworld, one of the seminal newsweeklies of the computer age, is folding the paper version “to focus on online and events. Steve Fox. the editor, writes: InfoWorld is not dead. We’re not going anywhere. We are merely embracing a more efficient delivery mechanism –the Web — at InfoWorld.com. You can still […]

Food and Loathing

SF Chronicle: Food bloggers dish up plates of spicy criticism / Formerly formal discipline of reviewing becomes a free-for-all for online amateurs: Just days after opening Senses, his San Francisco bistro, Teo Kridech clicked onto the World Wide Web only to find that his dream business was considered an overnight flop. “Senses is like a […]