Cit Media

Universidad Mayor and TVN, a Chilean broadcaster, are bringing me to Santiago the week after next for three days of talks, workshops and more. They’ve even set up a Web page for the events, and asked me to record a short greeting video for the gig. It’s all here.

If we can pull it together we may have a blogger meet-up while I’m in town. Stay tuned…

NY Times: Dow Jones Drops CNBC Ads From Web Sites in Favor of Fox Links. On the day they had contracted to run advertisements placed by CNBC, two Web sites owned by Dow Jones & Company instead ran ads for that cable business channel’s new competitor, the Fox Business Network. Both MarketWatch and The Wall Street Journal’s Web site, WSJ.com, filled up the exact spaces CNBC had purchased with rotating ads that included some for Fox Business Network. These were accompanied by links to foxbusiness.com, the Web site of the Fox Business Network. The ads for Fox started running soon after midnight.

It’s just business, right? Maybe, but it suggests the ethical standards of the parent company.

NY Times: Group Plans to Provide Investigative Journalism. Paul E. Steiger, who was the top editor of The Wall Street Journal for 16 years, and a pair of wealthy Californians are assembling a group of investigative journalists who will give away their work to media outlets.

Foundations are stepping into the breach left by downsizing media companies, and not a minute too soon. This effort will, if it works, be a serious contributor to the news scene.

But it looks to be aiming at the biggest stories, not the local investigative pieces that are the most threatened of all as newspapers — which do almost all of the serious local journalistic investigations these days — whack at staffs and ambitions. Will foundations step up to that, too?

There’s one serious omission in the Times story, which says:

The nearest parallels to Pro Publica may be the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, groups that support in-depth work and have had considerable success getting it published or broadcast in mainstream media.

This will come as news to the organization that has done, by and large, the finest such work of all: the Center for Public Integrity. Is it possible that the Times reporter didn’t know about the center’s work? Or is it that the center doesn’t get its work published in “mainstream” media that is the issue? Either way, it deserved mention here.

The SF Chronicle banners on its front page, “Neighborhoods Crumble in Wave of Foreclosures“:

The combination of plunging values and higher mortgage payments created the perfect breeding ground for foreclosures. Homeowners who could not afford escalating monthly payments also could not refinance if their homes were worth less than the mortgages, and could not sell for enough to pay off their loans. That left foreclosure as the most likely outcome.

If any other Bay Area newspaper was more of a cheerleader for the real estate bubble as it inflated than the Chronicle, I don’t know what it is. Now as the meltdown occurs, there’s apparently no reflection inside the paper about its own role in this mess.

SF Chronicle: Wikimedia abandons Florida for San Francisco. The Wikimedia Foundation, the force behind the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is moving its headquarters to San Francisco this winter, further solidifying the Bay Area’s position as the epicenter of the Web 2.0 movement, which focuses on collaboration, community and user-generated content.

GateHouse Media, a big newspaper company, is holding an in-house contest for ideas that will generate $50 million in new earnings, Poynter reports. (The rules are here.) The winner can get up to $1 million.

The contest is a great idea. But it should be open to all, not just GateHouse. The best ideas aren’t coming from inside media companies these days. They’re coming from everywhere.

Editor & Publisher: Journos in Bay Area Launch ‘Chauncey Bailey Project’. In a collaboration reminiscent of the 1976 “Arizona Project,” more than two dozen San Francisco Bay Area journalists are launching the Chauncey Bailey Project to continue the investigative reporting the Oakland Post editor was pursuing when he was murdered on Aug. 2.

This is heartening news. A few weeks ago I questioned the relative silence in the journalism community about Bailey’s killing. I subsequently heard from a friend who’s involved in this new project that people were going to push this hard, and here we go.

Jay Rosen offers “What I Learned from Assignment Zero.”

A great deal, it turns out…

We’re still not clear what happened, but the site may have been under some kind of attack. Happily, we’re back up, at least for now.

The news that MSNBC has bought Newsvine is a very big deal in the new media world. MSNBC.com has done a lot of excellent online journalism over the years, and pulling Newsvine under its wing make perfect sense.

Now we need to see the experiment taken to a more logical conclusion, because Newsvine and its competitors are getting only part of this right — and a company with deep pockets could take it further.

Along with Digg and Reddit and others, Newsvine is one of the sites that has led the way in the voting-on-news arena. But popularity is an extremely crude tool when it comes to understanding quality, better than nothing but not much better.

They and the host of competitors out there need to add reputation to the mix. Whoever gets this right will win, big, and so will the rest of us as we move toward seriously useful community vetting of news and information. We’re not even close yet.