Cit Media

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 News column — in a double-bylined piece (which should have been an immediate tip that we were up to something) — to “reveal” that Stanford University was aiming for an initial public offering (IPO) of shares to the public.

I heard that day from a venture capitalist of some renown. I don’t have his email any longer, but he wrote to the effect that “You had me going just long enough to wonder if it was real.”

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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 as online sources and electronic archives of journals. In the process, the student papers are added to the database.

Turnitin.com provides a service, but its archiving — copying and reusing — the copyrighted work of others in this way is at best problematic.

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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! News pages. To start, we’ll be looking especially to our foreign bureaus: Baghdad, Cairo, Jerusalem and Beijing are first in line to contribute, scheduled to begin early in the second quarter.

They won’t just be sending news stories, though that’s a foundation for the plan. In addition, they’ll produce blogs available only at Yahoo! and McClatchy that take readers deeper — “behind the headlines” is the applicable cliché. Called “Trusted Voices,” we’ll encourage them to color outside the lines of traditional journalism in their blogs, offering readers a boots-on-the-ground perspective from the Arab street in Egypt or the increasingly crowded slopes of Everest (to name two of their recent datelines). Maybe Hannah Allam will provide a list of the Egyptian websites or blogs she finds most useful in understanding politics there; Dion Nissenbaum might help you unravel the political connections of those Israeli newspapers you always hear quoted. Tim Johnson, who covers China and Asia from Beijing, could offer insight into obstacles facing people thinking about going for the Olympics in 2008.

Some of these will be new efforts launched especially for this Yahoo! partnership; others are already under way. Tim’s been blogging from China for years at China Rises. The Iraqi employees at our Baghdad bureau offer a gritty, street-level view of the war no non-native reporter could duplicate at their group blog Inside Iraq.

This is the kind of thing news organizations should be doing as a matter of routine. McClatchy and Yahoo are changing the industry with this move. Let’s see who follows.

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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.)

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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 inevitability of this kind of thing stems from the fact that it can be done. And what can be done will be, despite violating the site’s terms of service.

The real issue is whether it matters. It does, if people start trusting the YouTube numbers as indicators of anything serious. It does, if people focus on the questions that don’t matter and not the ones, such as candidates’ actual positions and intentions, that do.

Good for techPresident for spotting this anomaly, for committing actual journalism while the traditional media organizations slept.

• More from Jeff Jarvis.

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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 you posted a genuine comment that got inappropriately identified as spam. If so, it may have been deleted in a bulk-delete operation that I do once a day or so. I don’t have the time to go through the comments identified as spam one at a time to un-mark them, because of the horrible volume of this crap.

If you’ve tried to post a legitimate comment that didn’t make it through, let me know. If I haven’t run the bulk-delete before you tell me, I’ll be able to retrieve your posting and make it public. If not, I apologize.

But the spammers — such slime they are — have left me little choice.

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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 this group is the most traditional of all.

My talk was more structured than some I’ve done lately. I suggested five points of departure:

• The shift from top-down media to an ecosystem that includes edge-in contributions
• Who is a journalist, and what do we call journalism in this new era?
• New economic competition and emerging business models
• How traditional journalists should join the conversation
• Issues or trust and reliability.

The last of those was, as usual in gatherings where I participate, the focus of significant debate. Traditional journalists tend to assume they are uniquely qualified to be the arbiters of truth and trust. We disagree on this.

But we don’t disagree on the need to preserve the best of what these folks do. I can’t solve the business-model issues that don’t seem to be getting any less worrisome. But we can work together to help people get the information they need.

Increasingly I believe that one of traditional journalism’s vital roles will be to help society become more media literate. This will rebound to the benefit, perhaps, of professional journalists, but that’s not a good enough reason by itself to do it. Society needs the help.

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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 the foundation’s Citizen News Network, which Knight intends to turn into a major hub of this activity and which, in turn, is being hosted at Jan Schaffer’s excellent J-Lab site at the University of Maryland.

Here’s the J-Lab press release.

Many thanks to JD Lasica, who spearheaded this project for the center, and the rest of the team that worked on it during the last few months. And very special thanks to all the folks who agreed to be interviewed; as the saying goes, we couldn’t have done it without them.

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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 get all the news coverage, reviews, analysis, opinion, and commentary that InfoWorld is known for. You’ll just have to access it in a browser (or RSS reader) — something more than a million of you already do every month.

It’s not the first. It won’t be the last.

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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 botched face lift covered with layers of poorly applied cheap make-up on a hot humid day in Biloxi, Miss.,” one poster wrote on the Web site Yelp.

The restaurant owner in question tells the paper that the posts “nearly killed my business” — a statement that is impossible to prove (and which raises strong doubts in my mind). But it’s a heck of an anecdote for the newspaper to hang a story on.

Too bad the reporters didn’t do a bit more homework. The following paragraph — what journalists call the “nut graf,” or the essential kernel of the piece — is especially problematic:

If you think restaurant critics from mainstream newspapers, television and magazines are tough on the food industry, you haven’t spent much time in cyberspace. Online message boards, gossip columns, city restaurant guides and food blogs are proliferating and having a profound influence on where consumers spend their eating dollars. The once-genteel discipline of restaurant reviewing has turned into a free-for-all, celebrated by some as a new-world democracy but seen by others as populist tyranny.

When they lump all blogging and message boards and the other activities together, they undermine their thesis, part of which is absolutely correct.

The difference between an anonymous (actually pseudonymous) comment posting and a blog post by someone who stands behind his or her own words could not be much greater. The former deserves little or no credence — I assign anonymous comments negative credibility in my own reading. Whether the latter has credibility, at least from my perspective, depends on whether it’s earned some of my trust.

Sites like Yelp are inherently untrustworthy when it comes to individual postings. They gain a bit of credibility when the weight of the comments runs strongly in one direction or another — though not all that much, because of the anonymity and, one suspects, the way comment-driven sites may be gamed by determined nay-sayers or people who try to artificially pump up an establishment’s rating with the equivalent of spam.

Contrast the anonymous comment with the work of a blogger who reports relentlessly on a topic about which he or she cares deeply. I’ve started reading several food bloggers in the San Francisco Bay area whose work strikes me as at least interesting as any professional restaurant critics.

If I owned a restaurant, however, I’d read the comments avidly and participate in the conversation no matter how annoying I found it; the option is ostrich-like. I’d be putting in the comments my responses to the negative comments, and I’d keep asking people to use their real names, and ask them why they won’t stand behind their words.

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