Cit Media

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.

Share This

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

Share This

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

Share This

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 potential when funded often join a graveyard of well-intentioned initiatives when the funding dries up. Countries such as Sri Lanka are still bedevilled by the lack of standards based swabhasha data input frameworks that in turn strangle the awareness and growth of new media content, such as blogs, in Sinhala and Tamil. As a result, contrary to its moniker, citizen journalism today shows an urban bias, is mediated in English and, inescapably, elite. This will need to change and soon.

Share This

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 in the citizen-journalism sphere recently. But the broader trend is positive, as this announcement demonstrates.

(Disclosure: I’m on NowPublic’s advisory board.)

Share This

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 of Parliament for broadcasters or anyone else to use footage of the chamber for “satire, ridicule or denigration”.

This sounds so outlandish that I can’t believe have trouble believing it’s true. We’ll keep an eye on this and let you know.

Share This

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 an “elder” but definitely not an old man.

For many folks in this swiftly changing world, age 60 is just another year for new ideas and activities. Consider Doc, a friend and colleague whose work has inspired me for years.

At Harvard’s Berkman Center, where we’re both Fellows, he’s working at the moment on Vendor Relationship Management, the idea of making”markets work for both vendors and customers — in ways that don’t require the former to ‘lock in’ the latter.” It’s an enormously important idea, and could lead toward major changes.

I suspect that VRM could not have come from a young person. It’s one of those notions that takes hold slowly and requires experience, not just talent, to ripen.

The age of 60 came up recently in another context. I’m on a task force helping to rethink the John S. Knight Fellowships for journalists at Stanford University. These have been “mid-career” fellowships, but in the modern world the definition of mid-career surely must change. I know some 25-year-olds who’ve already done spectacular things, and some 60-year-olds who are just getting around to inventing new kinds of journalism products and projects. “Sixty isn’t old anymore,” I said in one of our meetings. (Doc is busy enough now, but I’d endorse him for one of these fellowships in a microsecond.)

From here, it looks like Doc Searls is accelerating, not slowing down. A good thing for all of us, but especially this brilliant and genuinely good man.

Happy birthday, Doc.

(Photo from Doc’s Flickr page)

Share This

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 via email, not via Facebook, because I have no idea when I’ll log back into the site.

Meanwhile, there’s a slew of new “friend” invitations and assorted other stuff to look through. I’m overwhelmed by it all, in part because of the foolishly tedious process the site forces you to endure to vet and approve new “friends” — no batch add of people, as LinkedIn smartly allows, and a ridiculous insistence that you explain your connection to the other people before you can accept them as friends.

Moreover, I don’t find it terribly useful except for the bloggish feature in the center of the personalized page. That’s a not-bad summary of people’s activities, but it doesn’t compensate for all the other issues.

I’m inclined to agree with Jason Calacanis, whoi declared Facebook bankruptcy, and with Dave Winer, who never accepted it as a liability in the first place. But the germ of an incredibly useful site remains — if it’s made considerably more open, in the sense of letting people export their data in ways of their own choosing.

If you’re on Facebook and want to contact me, please don’t use the internal messaging system. Go here instead. Thanks.

Share This

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 offer and of their own family trusts.

Talk about dysfunctional families. Whew…

Share This

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 ones at the Chronicle. In final Chronicle piece, Lazarus appropriately lauds editors who’ve stood behind his pro-consumer writings.

But I have to note two surprising lapses in today’s column, in which Lazarus interviews Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate turned politician, “to look at the state of consumer advocacy in the United States.” The piece points out that consumers, in a time of government abandonment of consumer protection, are largely on their own, and urges more media activism in this space.

Bloggers and other upstart media have taken on much of what’s missing from government and (most) traditional media. Take a look at the merciless consumer reporting at the Consumerist for a stark example. Moreover, people are talking about companies in forums, mail lists and other sites that tend to be unnoticed by Big Media but which serve a terrific purpose.

Nader’s work in the 1960s and 1970s was indeed pathbreaking. But his more recent work helped create the very problems the columnist describes.

How could Lazarus ignore an absolutely essential fact? Namely: Nader’s presidential campaign in 2000 is one of the key reasons that the current administration — which has systematically gutted consumer protection — won power in the first place. Isn’t this relevant?

A small nit: Lazarus notes, coyly, that he’s moving to “another well-known newspaper that’s beefing up its consumer coverage.” Why not just name the LA Times? The failure to spell it out is a vestige of what should be a long-past era when journalists mentioned the competition only under extreme duress. And the Times only competes with the Chronicle online, if at all.

In any event, the Bay Area will miss his work. Luckily, we’ll be able to find it online.

Share This