Cit Media

UPDATED

AP: Media barred from covering Rove speech at prep school. The media have been barred from covering a speech by former presidential adviser Karl Rove to students at a prestigious prep school on Monday.

Please, please, Choate students — blog it. Be the media. Don’t let Rove or your administration get away with this.

(Note: I regret to say, at least right now, that I”m a graduate of this school.)

Update: The school did ultimately allow at least one journalist into the event.

UPDATED

Good grief. Look at the members of ProPublica’s Journalism Advisory Board:

Jill Abramson, a managing editor of The New York Times; Martin D. Baron, the editor of The Boston Globe; David Boardman, the executive editor of the Seattle Times; Robert A. Caro, historian and biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson; John S. Carroll, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun; L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal; David Gergen, professor of public service at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Center for Public Leadership; Shawn McIntosh, the director of culture and change at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Gregory L. Moore, the editor of The Denver Post; Priscilla Painton, the new editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster; Allan Sloan, a senior editor at large for Fortune magazine; and Cynthia A. Tucker, the editor of the editorial page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Board will advise ProPublica’s editors from time to time on the full range of issues related to ProPublica’s journalism, from ethical issues to the direction of its reporting efforts.

Great people and journalists, every one of them. But what a disappointing list in one major respect.

This is not a group with any serious understanding of the Web, nor a board that will instantly grasp why the new digital platforms are made to order for melding traditional investigative journalism with what technology enables. Not one of these people is a digital native, or even close to it.

That’s a stunning oversight, and the journalism will almost certainly reflect it.

UPDATE: Paul Steiger, ProPublica’s editor in chief, replies via email: “Understood and anticipated. Watch whom we hire.”

NY TImes: Putting Candidates Under the Videoscope. (T)he embeds have changed the dynamic of this year’s election, making every unplugged and unscripted moment on the campaign trail available for all to see. One particular video shot of American flags tilting over behind Hillary Rodham Clinton last November has been viewed more than 300,000 times on the ABC News Web site. A video of the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly shoving a member of Barack Obama’s staff at a New Hampshire campaign rally has drawn almost 150,000 views on YouTube.

The dynamic was changed earlier, actually — supporters and opponents have been making videos of candidates for some time. What has changed is the notice of this by major media organizations as an endemic part of the process.

What is still not part of the understanding is the sheer unfairness of letting a single moment on video reflect a person’s reality. Yet this is what seems to happen on a regular basis.

When, as in the case of former Sen. George Allen — he of the famous “Macaca” comment — there is a history of racially charged words and deeds, then you have something worth discussing. When it’s simply one of those weird moments on the campaign trail, it’s nothing or close to it.

I could follow anyone reading this with a video camera for an hour and post something on the Web that would make you look ridiculous. You could do the same to me. Neither posting would reflect who we really are.

A culture of gotcha is a shallow culture. Is it the one we really want to promote?

Marc Andreessen has inaugurated “the New York Times Deathwatch” — and the data he cites should be giving the Times-folk nightmares. But then, the company’s board of directors is a particularly inept group considering the absolute need to move, fast, into the digital world for real, with all that means.

Marc writes, with utterly appropriate snark, of this crew:

Well, given that the Internet is the central force dismantling the company’s business, I’m sure that by now they’ve stocked their board with noted Internet experts. Let’s see:

• Brenda C. Barnes — CEO of Sara Lee; noted snack cake expert
• Raul E. Cesan — former CEO of Schering-Plough; noted Levitra expert
• Daniel H. Cohen — president of DeepSee LLC, “an oceanic exploration and submarine leasing company”; noted Jacques Cousteau expert
• Lynn G. Dolnick — former head of exhibits for the National Zoologic Park in Washington DC; noted marsupial expert
• Michael Golden — current publisher of the International Herald Tribune; former head of the company’s Women’s Publishing Division; noted sundress expert
• William E. Kennard — former head of the FCC; noted “seven dirty words” expert
• James M. Kilts — former CEO of Gillette; noted smooth, smooth shave expert; prior to that, unindicted coconspirator at Philip Morris; noted expert on your grandfather’s hacking cough
• David E. Liddle — here I have to take a pause as I actually know this one; based on what’s happening at the company, it could be reasonably asked whether he’s actually attending the board meetings.
• Ellen R. Marram — former CEO of Nabisco; noted Oreo expert. Oh, wait, she actually ran an Internet company: “From 1999 until 2000, Ms. Marram was president and chief executive officer of efdex Inc. (the Electronic Food & Drink Exchange), an Internet-based commodities exchange for the food and beverage industry.” Ooh. I wonder if that ended well.
• Thomas Middelhoff — former CEO of Bertelsmann; noted expert on complicated family politics — well, that’s probably coming in handy…
• Janet L. Robinson — current CEO of the New York Times Company; noted expert on horrific business implosions
• Doreen A. Toben — CFO of Verizon; noted 30-year debenture expert
• And finally, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. — the Big Kahuna — the Man — the Guy In Charge — the chairman and scion — the dude with the cojones to actually defend Judy Miller. Not noted Internet expert.

Now, some hedge-fund investors who quite plainly care only about the money — and not the public trust aspect of publishing the nation’s best and most important newspaper — are trying to persuade the company to add some board members who have a clue. One of the people they hope to put on the board is Allen Morgan, a friend who is managing director at Mayfield Fund in Silicon Valley. He gets this stuff more thoroughly than almost anyone I know.

I own some NY Times Co. shares, and they’re worth a lot less than I paid for them. I will continue to hold these, even if the company utterly tanks, because I believe in the mission of newspapers and believe the Times has some of the best journalists in the world and could make the move to the Net much better than it has done to date — and that there is absolutely no choice but to move more quickly.

The hedge fund speculators could care less about journalism or the public good, no doubt. But they’re doing a stodgy institution a huge favor. Sadly, the institution is so hidebound that it doesn’t recognize the writing on its own wall.

We have an opening at Arizona State for someone to work with me at the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. Here’s the official listing (feel free to pass it around):

Business Development Coordinator, Digital Media

The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication seeks a business development coordinator for the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. The center, which was established this year, is devoted to the development of new media entrepreneurship and the creation of innovative digital media products. It is funded by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The ideal candidate will have experience as a new media entrepreneur and possess a solid understanding of business planning and principles. He or she will work closely with the Center’s director, Dan Gillmor, and with students from journalism, business, engineering and other schools, singly and in teams, to plan, prototype and, if possible, launch new-media projects. (This is not a fundraising position.) The business development coordinator will report to the director of the Knight Center and will hold the faculty rank of lecturer in the Cronkite School.

Minimum qualifications: Bachelor’s degree and experience in the business development of digital media.

For more information on the Knight Center, click here.

To apply: Submit cover letter, resume and three (3) professional references and contact information to:

Search Committee – Knight Center
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism
PO Box 871305
Tempe, AZ 85287-1305

Applications may also be submitted via email at jjobs@asu.edu.

Applications must be received by 5:00 PM, March 1, 2008.

Arizona State University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply.

The Citizen Media Law Project has launched the first iteration of its Legal Guide, which

addresses the legal issues you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues. You can search by keyword, browse by state, browse by section, or simply jump right in.

This is prodigious work by David Ardia, Sam Bayard and a team of interns at Harvard Law School. Congratulations to all.

Microsoft’s Offer To Buy Yahoo For $44.6 Billion is likely to turn in large part on whether the founders, who still hold a great deal of stock, go with their investors who want to take the money and run. I’m betting they will, reluctantly, though I still believe Yahoo could have a great future as a stand-alone company. More than almost any other Web company, Yahoo understands aggregation and the best of bottom-up media. Microsoft barely has a clue.

But Google is getting pretty worrisome in its own way — too big and powerful to trust. We need large and small counterweights, and perhaps a Microsoft-Yahoo combination will be one of them.

It’s worth noting, meanwhile, that the offer of slightly less than $45 billion isn’t much higher than ExxonMobil’s 2007 profits. The juxtaposition in today’s NY Times, below, is pretty startling.

BBC: Afghan senate backs death penalty. Afghanistan’s upper house of parliament has issued a statement backing a death sentence for a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan. Pervez Kambakhsh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge. The UN has criticised the sentence and said the journalist did not have legal representation during the case.

This case shocks the conscience. Journalists — all of us — should be trying hard to stop this outrage.

If Afghanistan kills this man it will lose support from people who care about liberty, and at a time when it most needs that support. Surely Americans will ask themselves why our soldiers are dying to preserve such a loathsome regime. I know I will.