Posts from ‘January, 2009’

This is the kind of thing that makes me crazy. The Washington Post runs an interesting story — Obama’s $100,000-Plus Donors Were Able to Give to Several Entities — about “nearly 100” wealthy families who’ve been giving big bucks to Obama. The story is based on data the paper crunched itself. But the article names […]

Ethan Zuckerman: Is ad-supported journalism viable in a pay-for-performance age? (I)t’s possible that the way we’ve built media in the United States can’t survive a transition to a more rational market.

Glenn Greenwald (Salon): Establishment Washington unifies against prosecutions. As confirmed accounts emerged years ago of chronic presidential lawbreaking, warrantless eavesdropping, systematic torture, rendition, “black site” prisons, corruption in every realm, and all sorts of other dark crimes, where were journalists and other opinion-making elites? Very few of them with any significant platform can point to […]

StinkyJournalism.org: The Unspoken Peril for “Citizen Journalists” Surprise! You Owe the IRS Some Gift Tax! Is the “donation” of a citizen’s content (video, articles, commentaries, images) to for-profit media outlets that exceeds a fair market value of $12,000 in any single year subject to gift tax? Judging from the IRS guidelines, the answer is “yes.” […]

The Citizen Media Law Project has a terrific explainer up today — “Documenting the 2009 Presidential Inauguration” — for people who are planning to be in Washington for the Obama inauguration. It explains: During the Inauguration, heightened security measures will be in place across Washington, D.C., particularly in the areas where official events are taking […]

Jay Rosen: Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized– connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And […]

Lasantha Wickramatunga: And Then They Came for Me. No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces – and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the last few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print institutions have been […]

NBPC New Media Institute 2009: The National Black Programming Consortium and its National Minority Consortia partners invite you to participate in the 4th Annual New Media Institute (NMI). The NMI is a unique professional development program working to transform producers of color from television producers into media-makers who can work seamlessly between various digital platforms. […]

The New York Times has been among the prime examples of media organizations that refuse to call torture what it is: torture. The euphamism that the Times and other traditional (and cowardly) media outlets have been using has typically been “enhanced interrogation techniques” — despite the fact that at least one of those techniques, waterboarding, […]

Howard Rosenberg replied to my posting that criticized his (and a co-author’s) misguided views on government versus corporate censorship (I don’t believe the latter exists). I’ve posted his email in the body of that post, which you can find here.