Posts from ‘July, 2007’

NY TImes: Murdoch Seen to Win Control of Dow Jones. Rupert Murdoch appeared today to have gained enough support from the deeply divided Bancroft family to buy Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for $5 billion. A sad day for journalism, but not surprising.

All I can say is I’m glad he’s doing it: The 5-4-3 double play, or “The Art of Conference Blogging”

Jeff Howe (Wired Magazine): To Save Themselves, US Newspapers Put Readers to Work.

Sanjana Hattotuwa (ICT4Peace): Citizen Journalism and humanitarian aid: Bane or boon? The deep-rooted power of politicians in rigid social structures, casteism, a clientelist political architecture, rampant nepotism and corruption, among others, temper the progressive social transformation promised by the New Media and Citizen Journalism in particular. Scalability is another problem – projects that show great […]

Globe and Mail (Toronto): NowPublic nixes takeover bids, lands financing. NowPublic.com, a leading “citizen journalism” site based in Vancouver announced today that it has closed a $10.6-million (U.S.) round of financing from venture capital groups in the U.S. and Canada, after turning down several offers to acquire the company outright Yes, there have been setbacks […]

Press Gazette (UK): MPs outlaw satire in New Zealand. New Zealand’s Parliament has voted itself far-reaching powers to control satire and ridicule of MPs in Parliament, attracting a storm of media and academic criticism. The new standing orders, voted in last month, concern the use of images of Parliamentary debates, and make it a contempt […]

Doc Searls — blogger’s blogger, journalist, author and deep thinker about how the world is changing and how we can be more effective participants — turns 60 today. It wasn’t so long ago that 60 reflected a fairly old age, or something verging on that. No longer. It’s a passage — David Weinberger calls Doc […]

I’ve been using Facebook mostly to get a feel for its possibilities, not as a place to do business or keep all that close track of anything. I logged onto the site today and found four messages from people who either already knew my email address or who could have easily found it. I’ve responded […]

NY Times: Family Shifts Add to Doubt at Dow Jones. The deliberations of the Bancroft family over whether to sell the publisher of The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation took several bizarre turns yesterday as family members switched sides, sniped at one another and even sought to change the terms of the […]

David Lazarus has been, in general, an excellent business columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s taken consumer protection more seriously than just about any journalist in California, and perhaps the nation. Now he’s moving to the Los Angeles Times, where I hope he’ll thrive. I hope his editors there are as tough-minded as the […]