Cit Media

The SF Chronicle’s David Lazarus, normally a terrific columnist, digs a deeper hole today in a surprisingly un-sharp response to criticism of another recent column.

Here’s what started the debate: “Pay-to-play is one way to help save newspapers.” Please read it and then come back.

I was one of the critics of that column. In this posting, which I hope you’ll also review, I took Lazarus to task on several accounts, including his misguided understanding of the copyright issues he brought up and, even more amazing, his call for a new antitrust exemption for the newspaper industry so it could make more money online.

(I do regret my use of the phrase “pathetically whiny” to describe the way his original column sounded. That was over the top.)

Today, Lazarus fires back in “So who will get the story?” — an angry commentary that, tellingly, fails to seriously address the problems with his original piece.

Let’s be clear on one thing. He has a right, and maybe a duty, to respond when people attack unfairly. And some of the people who responded to his original piece did make some ridiculous claims.

He errs in his utter dismissal of bloggers, however, as anything but uninformed opinion spouters. There’s ample evidence to disprove that broad-brush characterization. But let’s chalk that up to the columnist’s privilege.

In flaying his critics, he writes:

Dozens of bloggers weighed in on my earlier column, and not one — not one — did a lick of original reporting in challenging my ideas.

That is wrong again. I can’t speak for the others whom he insists insist did no reporting (though, how did he know for sure?), but I can speak for myself.

Let’s see. Does my book about the changes in media count as reporting? I spent a considerable portion of that book looking into the questions of how people will get useful news — hopefully, I wrote, via en expanded journalistic ecosystem that includes both the traditional and new media.

Does the fact that I spend my days now looking at these issues — plainly, in a lot more detail than he has — count? My posting was based entirely on my reporting over the past few years.

How much time has Lazarus spent reporting — that is, digging out information — on copyright issues? In the decade I was writing a column at the San Jose Mercury News, and since then, I’ve spent countless hours reading books and documents, and interviewing copyright lawyers and industry people on that subject.

I ask this question because he mischaracterized the copyright questions in his first column. The analogy of YouTube to what aggregators do was flat-out specious. I pointed that out. Lazarus didn’t address that today — or, for that matter, any of the actual issues raised in my posting, except tangentially in the case of wanting to create a newspaper cartel.

The antitrust question is one of opinion. But I can’t believe Lazarus is still asking for a new exemption. His argument in both columns boils down to this: The monopoly era is fading, so we need new protection to preserve a business model that maintains enormous profit margins so we can continue to provide what we consider high-quality journalism.

As I noted in my original response to his first piece, the newspaper industry already has one antitrust exemption — the odious joint-operating agreements that let organizations combine business operations to create advertising dominance in individual cities. Now that the industry’s market power is fading, Lazarus wants more protection.

No. We do not want to grant even more special favors, not to a once-monopolistic and still-rapacious industry that for years has been reducing its journalistic value and screwing its customers.

Lazarus would come down like a ton of bricks — in his normally excellent work as a consumer rights crusader — on any other industry tried to pull the same trick. Does he not see how ironic (the kindest word I can use in this context) his call for protection sounds, coming from him of all people? I guess not.

Jon Garfunkel, in The Talking Points Meme, challenges newly conventional wisdom about bloggers’ roles in reporting the federal prosecutor mess — and notes some sloppy journalism (and blogosphere self-congratulation) as the scandal developed.

Amazingly, the man who concocted the anti-Hillary remix of the old Apple 1984 commercial is proud of himself.

After the Huffington Post outed Phil de Vellis, a now-former employee of a consulting firm that has been working for Barack Obama — whose campaign was designed to be the main beneficiary of the ad remix — de Vellis posted at the Huffington site an item called “I Made the “Vote Different” Ad. He starts:

Hi. I’m Phil. I did it. And I’m proud of it.

I made the “Vote Different” ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it–by people of all political persuasions–will follow.

This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens.

Not really.

We already knew that people could use online media to make political points, and that they could go around the traditional media to do so — though the ad in question wasn’t national news until the big networks, egged on by Matt Drudge, chose to make a big deal of it. Still, there was some viral spreading of the message, and it would have made the rounds to some degree even if the big media had ignored it.

His former employers say they didn’t know about this stunt until after he admitted it. Does that absolve them? Only, perhaps, in a technical sense. If Obama makes clear he’ll do no more business with this firm, he’ll probably win points for taking a stand for integrity in politics.

Anonymous and pseudonymous political speech have a long history in America. Every registered voter receives US Postal Service mail in the days before elections, political hit pieces that serve up sleazy negativity about candidates or issues, where the sender hides his identity and hopes that we won’t find out who he is — or whether what he says is true — until after the election. This repulsive activity sometimes turns elections.

Yet we don’t want to do away with anonymity, because we need to protect it for its essential uses. What de Vellis did doesn’t qualify. Not even close.

What de Vellis plainly doesn’t get is that he should be ashamed of what he did — not the creation of the remix but his craven hiding behind a pseudonym. People who don’t stand behind their words deserve, in almost every case, no respect for what they say. The exceptions come when someone risks life or freedom or livelihood by being a whistle-blower or truth-teller. When the purpose is to take down other people for what they believe, anonymity is a hiding place that has little honor.

Another lesson applies, and this one is about the rest of us: the audience for these kinds of things.

We are far too prone to accepting what we see and hear. We need to readjust our internal BS meters in a media-saturated age.

We should start with this principle:

An anonymous or pseudonymous attack on someone else should be presumed false, unless proved true.

If people started from this perspective, we’d have a much easier time dealing with the You-Tubing of the political class.

NY Sun: New Technique Lets Bloggers Tackle Late-Night News Dumps. A time-honored Washington practice of trying to extinguish, pre-empt, or redirect news coverage by dumping stacks of previously secret government documents on the press may be in for some changes after a headlong collision with hundreds of liberal Web loggers in the wee hours of yesterday morning.

This kind of thing is exactly how distributed journalism can occur. It will more routinely occur this way in the future, especially if the news industry gets its act together and starts realizing that the audience can be an amazing resource beyond providing credit card numbers for subscriptions.

Jay Rosen and his team are working on something more formal and complex at NewAssignment. But the idea is basically the same.

I still think someone should do the stock-option story this way…

Consumer Reports is a publication that works hard to get things right. In its February issue it ran a dramatically wrong review of children’s car seats — flawed due to poor testing methods — and seriously jeopardized the trust it had won from its readers.

But the organization’s response since then has been the finest demonstration I’ve ever seen of a) owning up to the mistakes; b) figuring out what went wrong; c) explaining what happened; and d) putting into place ways to prevent future such messes.

And it was all done in a public way. This kind of transparency is extremely rare in journalism. Yet it is utterly essential.

Soon after the report — in which all kinds of child-safety car seats apparently failed the magazine’s tests — came under challenge, it became clear that the tests themselves were flawed. The response from the magazine to its readers and the world was quick. It issued a retraction.

I subscribe to the CR online site. I got an e-mail - and a friend who gets the paper version got the same letter via mail - from Jim Guest, president of Consumers Union, the title’s parent. He apologized and sounded sincere. He explained what he knew so far about the error, apparently caused by an outside lab’s tests. He announced a further investigation. And he promised extraordinary efforts not to let it occur again.

I believe we’re getting all of this.

Yesterday, CR posted a detailed report, “How our car seat tests went wrong” — and the “series of misjudgments” described in the piece is remarkable. It was especially worrisome given the publication’s record. I don’t rely on CR for everything I buy, but I’ve learned to trust its overall judgement on uncomplicated consumer goods such as kitchen appliances, where I won’t ever take the time to do such research myself.

Yesterday’s report explained everything, in clear and unsparing language. It included justifiably angry comments from a car-seat maker and outside critics. It was self-criticism of the sort one almost never sees from a journalistic organization.

CR also posted a story called “Learning from our mistake,” a description of what it would do in the future. Among other things, the publication plans to bring outside experts into the process when creating complicated testing procedures (and already does that to a degree); fix the way it works with outside labs; and look much harder “when our findings are unusual.”

The last of those should have been second nature to the journalists and scientists at CR. After all, it’s famous for telling readers that when something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t. In this case - all those car seats failing the test - perhaps it was too bad to be true.

The magazine might consider opening its testing procedures in other ways. For example, it could create videos of the tests as they’re being conducted and post them online. Bring in the designated experts, by all means, but maybe some readers who are experts in their own way might spot something useful — an omission in the testing procedure or a valuable idea on how to improve it.

But let’s focus now on the essential things.

First, CR deserves points for integrity. I believe it had no alternative, but what the publication has done here had to be painful nonetheless.

Second, transparency has to become one of the key principles of honorable journalism. Let’s see more and more of this kind of thing.

I’ve just read the galleys of a book that will be published in a few weeks. It discusses the rise of edge-in, democratized media in distinctly unflattering ways. That, of course, is the author’s privilege.

But is it his right to misrepresent reality to “prove” his point?

The part of the book about which I know most — citizen journalism — contains some startling claims and analysis. It mischaracterizes my own work and beliefs. It gets some key facts dead wrong. It trivializes the genre, in part through the misuse of selective quotes.

I’ve exchanged several emails with the author. He didn’t address my specific issues except in one case, and his response there was no less misguided, from my point of view, than the material from the book. When I called him on this, he explained that the book is a “polemic” designed to spark debate, as if that gives him license to misrepresent things.

This is disappointing, to say the least. I’d been looking forward to this book, because I do believe we (all of us) need to have a deeper conversation about the effects of democratized media and peer-to-peer production.

But I was looking forward to a book that has more integrity than the one I’ve seen. Perhaps it will, in the final version.

If not, such a lost opportunity…

Last week, March 11-17, was known in journalistic and (some) governmental circles as “Sunshine Week” — a tribute to notions of open government, and a call to action to make it more so. Freedom of information was on tap in all kinds of ways.

But now that the official celebration is over, I want to remind folks that there are 52 weeks in the year. And the need to pursue open government is just as vital today as it was during the past seven days.

“Freedom of information” is not just a phrase. It is a pillar of an open and free society.

Nowhere has that pillar been more solid than in the United States. Congress and most state legislatures have enacted laws designed to keep governments more honest by opening up the information flow.

A key point about the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and various state “open records” laws: They are not designed solely for journalists, although that is the popular mythology, sometimes encouraged by professional journalists. They are for everyone, not any special profession or group of people.

Indeed, the uses of open-records laws vary widely. Among others: Lawyers file requests for information on behalf of corporate and other clients. Interest groups file to pry loose information of various kinds. Journalists file requests so they can cover the way governments do the people’s business. And average folks file requests to learn about governmental activities that escape the notice of the traditional media.

So is the battle won against government secrecy? Not by a long shot. Many in government work constantly to restrict information, sometimes for sound policy reasons but, as history shows, more often to bury their mistakes and misdeeds.

When recalcitrant record-keepers face open-records laws, they employ a variety of tactics, such as stalling and outright obstruction, to prevent us from getting the information to which we are entitled. Unfortunately, there are few sanctions in federal law and many state laws to deter such behavior.

The FOIA was first enacted in 1966. It has been amended several times, and Congress is now looking at a major — and welcome — overhaul to strengthen its provisions.

Many organizations have created excellent guides to the FOIA and state laws. Here are some links to the best such resources:

Freedom of Information portal, Society of Professional Journalists
First Amendment Center, Vanderbilt University
Freedom of Information Center, University of Missouri.
Freedom of Information Clearinghouse, Public Citizen advocacy group
FOIA information, National Security Archive
National Freedom of Information Coalition
How to Use the Federal FOI Act, Reporters Committee on Freedom of the Press

Valleywag points to the incredibly hypocrisy of Viacom, which has sued Google for big bucks over YouTube but encourages its own video “pirates” on a Viacom-owned site.

No surprise here, whatever.

Slowly but surely, some U.S. media companies are giving blogs to their audiences. The latest I’ve seen is from MyFoxDC, a Washington, D.C., TV station. As you’ll notice, staff blogs on the right side of the page are complemented with the audience blogs on the left.

The quality, as always with such things, is extremely mixed. But the fact that the station is doing this is the real story.

Wall Street Journal: Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration. Twitter is one of several growing services, including Google Inc.-owned Dodgeball, that tie together instant messaging, social networking and wireless communication. Twitter allows members to use their computers or cellphones to distribute short messages on what they’re doing. Each message is limited to 140 characters, but there are no limits on how many messages a user can send. Members specify whether they want to be alerted by a text message on their phones or an instant message on their PCs when friends post updates.

This story spends a lot of time worrying about the problem of message overload. I found it a problem, too, when I was signed up by an early user.

What about the journalistic potential of Twitter? It’s huge.

(I’m still baffled that Knight Ridder failed to use the domain headlines.com for stuff like this…)