Cit Media

The Silicon Valley company’s general counsel, Mike Dillon, writes that on Monday Sun:

will release our financial information first to the public via our website, RSS feeds and 8-K filing. Then, about 10 minutes later, we will release the information to the traditional private agencies and their paid subscribers.

This is a step forward in corporate transparency — not a gigantic one but nonetheless important. The company is using technology in a smart way, good for investors and regulators alike.

(Via Dave Winer)

The BBC Berkshire’s interactive flood map:

takes the best photos and video sent in by you to berkshire.online@bbc.co.uk, alongside reports from our correspondents around the county and flood warning information from the Environment Agency.

This is a good example of how traditional media organizations — working with their audiences — can use mashup technology to create new kinds of journalism.

BBC: Malaysia cracks down on bloggers. The Malaysian government has warned it could use tough anti-terrorism laws against bloggers who insult Islam or the country’s king.

I remember visiting Malaysia in late 2001, and being assured by people in business and government that the Internet was going to truly remain a free-speech zone (unlike the highly regulated traditional media). I also remember an online journalist telling me that this would last as long as the Net is being seen only by a tiny minority of the citizens.

Am I the only one who said “Oh, please” after seeing Martha Stewart on the cover of this month’s Wired magazine? Well, at least they didn’t put Enron’s Jeff Skilling on the cover.

The media column in the British Independent newspaper this week contains this remarkable passage, near the top:

Robert Thomson, the present editor of The (London) Times, nonetheless seems quite likely to exchange his once great office for a job on The Wall Street Journal. This depends on Rupert Murdoch acquiring the American business title, which seems highly probable. While he has been attempting to persuade the Bancroft family to sell its controlling stake in the WSJ, Mr Murdoch has called on the advice of Mr Thomson, a former Financial Times executive who has worked in America.

Mr Thomson’s denial that he is leaving The Times, and his expressions of devotion for London, are widely discounted as spin. He is more likely to become The Wall Street Journal’s publisher than its editor. Many Murdoch editors have yearned to escape the yoke of editing for the less taxing responsibilities of senior management.

“Widely discounted as spin.” Think about that for a moment.

If Thomson does leave the Times for the Wall Street Journal — this assumes that Murdoch’s News Corp. succeeds in the buyout, which seems likely at this point — his “denial that he is leaving the Times” will prove to have been more than spin. It will have been an outright lie.

The wink-wink nature of the Independent column speaks volumes about people’s assumptions of the motives and ethics of senior people in media companies, or at least in Murdoch’s: They are free to lie with impunity; it’s just business, apparently. (See Sydney Schanberg’s dismantling of Murdoch here.)

Of course, today’s media tend to let politicians lie with impunity. Rare is the case in which someone truly calls a lie what it is. Words like “dissemble” or expressions like “apparently at odds with what others have said” — when a blatant lie has been told — are routinely used to paper over the reality.

It’s especially disgusting when the lies come from journalism organizations, which (call me naive) ought to consider truth to be the top value. I don’t expect Murdoch’s operations, or operators, to adhere to high standards, but when media critics correctly rage at bad ethical behavior from people lower down on organization charts at, say, the BBC, and then give a pass to this kind of thing, the contradiction is blatant — and telling.

MSNBC: Advocacy mashups harness power of mapping. Advocacy mashups are tackling the most vexing problems of our time, from New Orleans post-Katrina clean-up to the possibility that some 2,300 Islamic mosques and schools across the country pose a homegrown terror threat.

The Gentilly Project, which we’re helping with, is one of the most intriguing such efforts. Stay tuned for much more information on this.

In London for a meeting with colleagues on a non-journalism project, I’ve been devouring the British press — noting, not for the first time, that the papers here do something that U.S. media folks do too little: tough media criticism.

For example, the BBC is taking some serious lumps over an astonishing internal ethical mess, and the Beeb’s head is dealing with a “new struggle to pick up the pieces,” the Observer reported yesterday. The newspaper — and all the others, as far as I can tell — are beating the daylights out of the BBC, and for the very good reason that the transgressions noted are truly bad news for what has been the world’s greatest journalism organization.

Meanwhile, the Guardian took the Observer, its sister newspaper, harshly to task as it thoroughly debunked an Observer article on autism, saying the “real villains” of scare stories about vaccinations are the media.

Good show, as it were…

Clark Hoyt, the New York Times’ new public editor (ombudsman), is off to a fast start. Today, in “Tiptoeing Around the Family Business,” he asks the paper to cover the story of the NY Times Company’s failings as a business:

Amid all this turmoil, aggressively reported and analyzed in The Times, there has been a comparative silence in the paper about its own owners, their challenges and their strategy. From Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to Landon Thomas Jr., a business reporter who has been assigned stories about The Times, everyone acknowledges a fundamental truth: It’s hard to write about yourself.

It’s long overdue, true. And, as anyone who’s worked for a newspaper knows, it’s incredibly hard to cover one’s own employer.

But readers can get this news another way. They can read the competition, including the Wall Street Journal, which, Hoyt notes, has covered this story much better.

Maybe the conflict is just too difficult to manage in some respects. And maybe a reader would be wise to recognize that the Times may never do the full story.

One valuable service the Times could perform is to point to other media outlets’ coverage of the company. Newspapers rarely point to the competition, or at least they don’t do it enough. This is a situation that almost demands such links.

The Participatory Culture Foundation has posted the latest pre-release (0.9.8) version of Miro, its renamed Internet multimedia player. The application is getting quite polished and useful.

News Photographer Magazine: New NFL Vest Rule (With Sponsor Logos) Have Some Seeing Red. The National Football League has passed a new rule for the upcoming season that requires photographers at NFL games to wear red vests with Canon and Reebok logos on them, and the news is not being very well received by some editors and photography directors as word spreads through the journalism community.

The NFL and other major sports leagues became popular in large part because traditional media organizations built them up. Now that the power is in the hands of the leagues, they’re throwing it around in increasingly brazen ways.

I don’t blame the league for trying this kind of stunt. What do you expect from a cartel, so used to having its own way on everything?

But if a single newspaper or other media organization accedes to the NFL’s ridiculous demand, it should be condemned by everyone who gives even the slightest hoot about honorable journalism.