Cit Media

New York Times: Citizen Huff: According to one person who was briefed on discussions but was not permitted to speak for attribution, the company has at least looked at the value of the site if it were put up for sale, and a figure around $200 million was used. That would put the price at more than $50 for each visitor, a high valuation. Using the site’s internal figures, 14 million unique visitors for the most recent month, the price would be closer to $15 for each user.

Even at $15 per user that’s still many millions — and it’s all built essentially on the labor of others who’ve volunteered to post their thoughts for no compensation. They have their reasons, including the site’s growing influence and their own vanity. Will they still volunteer their labor when just a few people get rich from it?

I admire what Huffington has done in many ways. I do not admire business models like this.

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I hope some of you can join us May 15-16 at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society for the Berkman@10 Conference: The Future of the Internet. This gathering, marking the center’s 10th anniversary, is shaping up to be an extraordinary affair.

As a Berkman Fellow the past several years, I’ve had a chance to spend (not nearly enough) time with some great people who are doing some of the best work on understanding the Net’s already powerful impact on our lives. The May conference will, in part, offer a summary of where we are and where we may be going. As the conference home page asks: “In tracing the trajectory of the past and attempting to lean into the future, what are the contours of the moment we find ourselves in? What are the most important questions that will propel us into the next decade?”

Among the many, many great speakers will be our lunchtime keynoter on Friday, May 16 — someone who’ll need little introduction to regular readers of this blog. He is Joshua Micah Marshall, founder and editor of Talking Points Memo and several related political blogs. What he and his team do each day has become essential reading for people who care about politics and policy, and he recently was honored for his work with a truly high honor in journalism, the George Polk Award.

I’ll have the honor of introducing Josh Marshall. He has been a touchstone for my own work, and has shown one way forward for the journalism “by the people, for the people,” in which I so fervently believe.

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The Knight Foundation (a funder of mine) is looking for someone to be its online community manager. The official posting follows:

Knight Foundation is looking for a unique and special digital media
talent. Does this describe you?

* A solid track record of creating and growing online
communities

* Lives and breathes the blogosphere and practically lives on
the Net

* An innate talent for creatively engaging and retaining people
online

* Excels in innovative communications and technology

If yes, you may be just the type of individual we’re seeking to fill our
Online Community Manager position, based in our Miami, Florida office,
reporting to the Vice President of Communications.

Play a key role in creating a vibrant online community for Knight
Foundation and shape it into the premier digital presence focused on
journalism excellence, communities and systemic, transformational
change. Help establish the foundation as the leading provocateur for
community transformation in the digital age. This position serves as
Knight’s eyes, ears and - in cooperation with other Knight staff - voice
in the blogosphere. You will attract, facilitate and moderate
user-generated content on all foundation web sites. Your goal will be to
increase awareness about the foundation’s mission among bloggers and
build and sustain engagement of Knight’s online community.

You will discover, edit and craft cutting edge, thought-provoking
content on transformational change in communities and journalism. You’ll
be responsible for convening online discussions and social networking
activities that increase visibility for and support the foundation’s
mission. You will play a leading role in the experimental foundation
presence on virtual online communities. You’ll be the foundation’s point
person for the needs, opportunities, trends and current digital, web and
electronic media issues in the communications and philanthropy fields.

Knowledge of journalism and communications, especially digital media, is
essential. You should have excellent writing skills and passion about
social innovation, journalism and entrepreneurship. You should be a
social network builder; be energetic, positive, and able to create an
online presence with a recognizable tone and style; be viewed as a
thought leader in the blogosphere. You must have an understanding of
current web, computer and multimedia systems, techniques and processes
at a level that gives you proficiency in creating and managing Web 2.0
content.

A bachelor’s degree in a related field and a minimum of two years of
directly related work experience is required.

To apply, please send your resume, salary history and links to examples
of your work to: careers@knightfoundation.org.

For more on the Knight Brothers’ foundation and transformational change,
go to http://www.knightfoundation.org/

Knight Foundation is an equal opportunity employer.

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In a brief but illuminating email thread leading up to a small conference on Friday in LA, we’re looking at key questions about citizen media’s future. One, obviously, is sustainability, which we all agree is key. Another participant in the discussion asked:

WHY do we need to expect individual initiatives to be sustainable? Is there not merit in the launches of serial enterprises, sequentially launched, within communities, with new ones imparting new vigor, skills and maybe even new goals?

Or, conversely: Is there merit in traditional news organizations anteing up some support for CitJ ventures to build a community information architecture?

My response:

Sustainable does not necessarily mean profitable, or long-lasting. An individual effort is sustainable as long as the person wants it to be, and that’s entirely fine.

I’m interested in seeing that communities have sustainable journalism and information ecosystems, not necessarily in the survival and profitability of individual ones. But institutional knowledge and historical/factual context do matter — and if each new entrant makes all the same mistakes someone else did 10 years earlier, that’s not especially helpful.

I still believe, even now, that traditional media remain in the best position not just to seed these ventures — internally as well as externally — but to make them a linchpin in their own long-term viability.

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Editor & Publisher: Newspaper Biz Editors Defend Mortgage Crisis Coverage. Did the growing mortgage credit crisis, which took a huge turn with last week’s collapse of Bear Stearns, get enough early coverage from newspapers? Top business editors at several of the nation’s major papers say yes, although a few admit some of the more complicated elements may not have been broken out enough for readers.

What tripe. The newspaper industry almost totally failed to do its job, and the public got screwed once again.

Citing a story here and there, as several editors do in the E&P piece, is not evidence of newspapers doing their job. It’s quite the opposite.

When an economic catastrophe of this sort — and entirely predicable one — is building, journalists are failing to do their jobs when they don’t harp on it.

As I said in a previous posting, newspapers and broadcasters were raking in billions in advertising from the real estate and banking industries as this bubble inflated. I do not believe this is a coincidence. I also don’t believe it was deliberate malfeasance; but you just don’t see lots of tough coverage in media of the people and companies paying the bills.

Many if not most papers have special weekly real estate pages or sections where you would find little hint of the potential for trouble. I know I looked for it in the papers I read. That’s where the discussion belonged — as well, of course, as Page One — not solely in the occasional business page stories. Hundreds of references to bubbles, most in the past year and not when there was a chance to slow down that train, were dwarfed by comparison to the buying advice that dominated coverage of real estate overall.

Oh, sure, there were extremely infrequent stories containing warnings in a few publications — and occasional quotes from skeptics in the prices-just-keep-rising stories that overwhelmingly dominated the coverage. But the reality is that journalists mostly didn’t have a clue, or didn’t want to have a clue. I don’t know which is worse.

Some bloggers, and some economists, did shout warnings. They were ignored, or worse, insulted by wishful thinkers and (I suspect) people who stood to gain from the continuing bubble.

Again, from a previous post, here are some questions the media all but ignored until too late:

Where were the stories we should have been seeing, noting that “buyers” — a word that is ludicrous in context –were running headlong toward a financial cliff? What happened to the coverage of a housing market that fewer and fewer people could afford to enter except with no-interest or no-down-payment loans, where home prices were so far out of sync with the economy that there was no precedent for such imbalance?

Where were the stories pointing out that the secondary (and far beyond) mortgage markets were salting hugely risky debt all through the American economy? You think your bank or pension fund doesn’t have some of this garbage somewhere in its books? Think again.

The media also bungled by not fingering the makers of this bubble apart from foolish “buyers” who proved to be such suckers. This boom was fueled by people who knew it couldn’t last: brokers, bankers and, above all, Wall Street’s ever-clever wizards who risk other people’s money for gigantic fees.

This is another journalistic scandal. It’s not quite on the order of the bended-knee, pre-war coverage — stenography of government officials’ lies and deceptions — that helped steer America into the Iraq war, but only because it’s not killing people in large numbers.

It’s a massive enough scandal, though. There’s plenty of pain left in this deflation, possibly including an outright tanking of the economy.

The journalism craft should take a long, hard look at what it’s failed to do, yet again, in the housing bubble. It has failed to warn — as loudly and incessanty as it did in promoting the housing bubble — that a financial crunch was on the way.

There’s plenty of blame to go around in this mess. The finger-pointing has barely begun. But when it gets going for real, I hope that journalists who do some of that pointing will at least look in a mirror.

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Journalists and technologists will rub elbows from April 30 through May 3 in Sunnyvale, California, at a conference called “NewsTools 2008” — a gathering that promises to bring together people who really need to know each other better. Pro journalists don’t use the available technology smartly enough — though they’re improving at this — and tech folks have too little understanding of why journalism matters and why they should be helping create the next version of the craft.

I’ll be bringing some students from Arizona State University to the conference, which so far has a lot more journalists than techies signed up. If you’re in the latter group, please give some thought to participating. This is a great opportunity to help create a future we all know we need.

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(This is the tenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

Regardless of whether you sold ad space, referred people to buy things at Amazon, or hawked a couple t-shirts, as soon as you make money through your website, the government considers you to be in business. Except in rare circumstances, that makes you responsible for reporting income, and paying taxes.

If you are the business’s only owner, you are operating as a sole proprietor (assuming you haven’t formed a legal business entity like a limited liability company or corporation). If you own the business with someone else, you are considered to be in a partnership.

Net income from sole proprietorships and partnerships is taxed as part of the owners’ personal gross income (the income is “passed through”). For IRS purposes, you are responsible for paying self-employment tax (social security and Medicare taxes that add up to a little over 15%) and for filing section SE and section C of your 1040 income tax return if your business revenue less expenses amounts to at least $400. This minimum is good news for small projects, which are exempt from paying and filing if their net income totals less than $400. Partnerships must also file a yearly informational return (form 1065) that says how finances were divided. As with any other income tax, there are likely to be state requirements as well.

An invaluable resource for these matters, the Citizen Media Law Project has recently launched the first sections of its Legal Guide.

“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, and addresses the legal issues that you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work online…[it] covers the 15 most populous U.S. states and the District of Columbia and will focus on the wide range of legal issues online publishers are likely to face, including risks associated with publication, such as defamation and privacy torts; intellectual property; access to government information; newsgathering; and general legal issues involved in setting up a business.”

The currently available sections are titled “Dealing with Online Legal Risks” and “Forming a Business and Getting Online“. The latter contains a wealth of national and state-specific information about issues such as taxes, business creation, legal documents, and nonprofit status-an idea that appeals to many citizen media types.

While the term “nonprofit” is sometimes used informally to refer to any organization that does not seek to make money or simply does not turn a profit, the legal definition is a little more complicated. Legal nonprofits are typically corporations that have applied for and are granted tax-exempt status with the IRS for federal income tax purposes. Depending on where it was incorporated, an organization may also be granted exemption from state income taxes.

The fact that corporations, not individuals, are granted tax exemption will probably be a deal breaker for most. Forming and maintaining a corporation requires a burdensome amount of time and paperwork, a host of legally required formalities, and in some states, prohibitively high fees. The Citizen Media Law Project section on How to Start a Business can give you a good idea of what goes into this process.

One way to get many of the benefits of being a nonprofit without all the work is to find a fiscal sponsor. Some organizations will extend their nonprofit status to groups or even individuals whose activities are within the scope of the sponsor’s purpose. This typically involves donations or other transactions going through the sponsor, who keeps a percentage (or charges a periodic fee), before untaxed money is passed along to you. One example of this is Fractured Atlas, which offers sponsorship to artists, acting similarly to PayPal in the way it accepts donations and charges administrative fees to withdraw.

Keep in mind that nonprofits are still responsible for paying taxes on “unrelated business taxable income.” The IRS considers this to be revenue received from any business trade or activity that is ongoing (one-time events, even if they last a week, are ok) and not substantially related to the organization’s charitable purpose. Generally speaking, a good way to gauge whether something is unrelated is if the only reason you have to call it “related” is that the revenue it generates will be used to further the organization’s cause.

Selling ad space is usually taxable, but underwriting or sponsorship-when a company donates money and is simply recognized as such by way of a logo or neutral text acknowledgement-is usually not. Most merchandise income will be taxable unless the sales come from a one-time special event or if the products being sold are directly related to the organization’s purpose (CD copies of your podcast are ok, but not a branded keychain). Affiliate income would almost never be considered related, but donations from the public would (both for you and for your donors, who can write it off of their own personal income tax). Please note that due to the room for interpretation the IRS leaves, there are exceptions to all of these rules. For more detailed information on unrelated business income, including dozens of examples, refer to IRS Publication 598.

If you still have questions about taxes, want to learn more about forming a business, want some examples of fiscal sponsors, or want to research these topics in more depth, much more information can be found at the Citizen Media Law Project. Moreover, you may well need the advice of a tax professional such as a certified public accountant.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

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Amanda Michel writes from Off the Bus:

The Huffington Post’s citizen-powered presidential campaign news site, OffTheBus, is looking for an experienced journalist to join our small team as an online news producer/reporter. The position requires working closely with our contributors on campaign-related stories between now and the November election. Day to day responsibilities include managing our team of citizen correspondents and editing their coverage; conducting outreach to bloggers and news sites; and planning coverage in advance of key events. OffTheBus also conducts distributed journalism projects, and the online news producer/reporter will be responsible for culling through information, helping to report the stories, on occasion leading that reporting and building out the story narratives on a project blog.

This is a position rich with potential and opportunity for someone who’s organized and detail oriented, proactive and sociable. While online community experience and technological savvy are great additions, they’re not requirements for the job. The position does require some demonstrable experience in political reporting as well as an understanding of and passion for the generation of news, especially in a New Media environment.

The position offers great incentives for professional advancement as the right candidate will have the opportunity to create high-profile contributions on one of the most-trafficked sites on the Web. Competitive compensation.

To apply, send your resume and clips to amichel@huffingtonpost.com.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/off-the-bus/

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Jon Garfunkel: Easy Mark: The Elephant in the Locker Room. (I)t’s still immensely foolish as it is to ban someone from the lockerroom because they call themselves a blogger. If a cutoff is needed, I’d suggest one based on the old standby, circulation.

“Mark” is Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks franchise, and he’s decided bloggers aren’t welcome in the team’s locker room. Given his status as a popular blogger this is modestly hypocritical, but it’s his franchise to muck with as he wishes.

There is, of course, a space problem in any locker room. Only a certain number of people fit, and a team is entirely justified in limiting the number of reporters allowed inside. So how to decide which ones?

Circulation or viewership/listenership is one metric that’s workable — though a blogger in question in this case works for the big daily paper, making Cuban’s decision even more odd. The best metric, of course, is clout: What reach does the journalist have in a more general way? What audience does he or she have? If a blogger’s chief audience includes journalists who cover the team and the team’s most fanatical fans, that would seem to be a good person to have around.

Rank speculation: One possibility here is that many bloggers, such as Cuban, don’t follow other people’s rules of verbal decorum. Sports reporters often become fanboys (or girls) of the teams they cover, to the detriment of the journalism and fans. Maybe Cuban is worried, in part, of more serious journalism about his team and its famous follies.

Great headline, meanwhile, from the Deadspin blog: “Mark Cuban Dislikes Bloggers Who Aren’t Him.”

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Glenn Greenwald (Salon) writes:

The most interesting part of the controversy over Obama advisor Samantha Power’s referring to Hillary Clinton as a “monster” — one might say the only interesting part — is that immediately after Power said it, she tried to proclaim that it was “off the record.” Here was Power’s exact quote:

“She is a monster, too –- that is off the record –- she is stooping to anything.”

But the reporter who was interviewing her, Britain’s Gerri Peev of The Scotsman, printed the comment anyway — as she should have, because Peev had never agreed that any parts of the interview would be “off the record,” and nobody has the right to demand unilaterally, and after the fact, that journalists keep their embarrassing remarks a secret.

Read the whole piece for a solid, if repetitive, analysis of U.S. journalists often-pathetic deference to power.

When I was a reporter and then a columnist, I had a rule that no public figure — that is, anyone who’d had experience with being interviewed — had the right to declare anything off the record after the fact. Now I might agree not to publish something if it wasn’t relevant, but if something was to be off the record it would be decided ahead of time.

I didn’t have the same policy with people who weren’t media-savvy. Sometimes I’d actually say to someone, “Do you realize that I what you’re telling me might go into the newspaper?” I’d let them reconsider their words.

In the past several days I’ve had a brief email correspondence with a journalism student (not from my own school) who is determined to conflate citizen journalism with the deliberate and unfair maligning of people for political reasons. He knows what he is going to say and only wants a quote or two from me to reinforce it. I declined to be part of his broad slam on a genre that is much more nuanced than he’s apparently trying to portray.

I will be publishing the emails in another post, with my commentary. My current intention is not to publish his name or institution, because I suspect he — despite his course of study — is not savvy about the media in any serious way.

Sadly, savvy in media for U.S. journalists tends to mean doing what powerful people want you to do. That’s the more serious problem, far more so than Powers’ unfortunate remark.

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