Posts under ‘Issues’

Washington Post: Report Says Nonprofits Sold Influence to Abramoff. Five conservative nonprofit organizations, including one run by prominent Republican Grover Norquist, “appear to have perpetrated a fraud” on taxpayers by selling their clout to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Senate investigators said in a report issued yesterday. The report includes previously unreleased e-mails between the now-disgraced lobbyist […]

UPDATED Business Week: Wal-Mart’s Jim and Laura: The Real Story. So are Laura and Jim real people? Or part of an elaborate publicity stunt? It turns out they are for real. However, their story, told in full, with certain financial payments disclosed, does not reflect as well on Wal-Mart as perhaps the company would like. […]

Jason Calacanis has written a very tough piece about an operation called PayPerPost, a company that has gotten serious venture-capital backing for a “service” in which bloggers are paid to write about products — but are not required to disclose their financial interest. We should generally abhor this kind of marketing. It encourages us to […]

Business Week Online: Unrepentant PayPerPost Gets Funding. The Orlando-based startup, which matches advertisers with bloggers willing to write about their products for $2 and up per post, will announce on Tuesday that it has netted $3 million in venture capital. The Series A round was led by Inflexion Partners, with Village Ventures and Draper Fisher […]

NY Times: False Accusation Sharpens Canadian Press Debate. A Canadian government commission faulted Canada, the United States and Syria for their treatment of the engineer, Maher Arar, whom it found to be completely innocent. The commission also found that several leading news organizations had been used by anonymous sources in a smear campaign against Mr. […]

Terry Heaton reports: Michael Rosenblum is launching a futuristic video news project with Verizon that ought to give the “trusted brand” crowd a shudder or three. He’s assembling news gathering units (what he terms “nodes”) in various cities that will make their content available via cellphone, web and cable, and he’s knee-deep in recruiting for […]

The Poynter Institute’s Bob Steele, in an essay entitled “HP’s Glass-Housed Critics,” writes: Journalists are not above using some forms of deception to get stories. We’ve long used our own form of sting operations. We’ve played private detective in ways that aren’t always so kosher. Sometimes we pretend to be someone other than a journalist. […]

AP: Pirate radio stations challenge feds. The rapidly proliferating scofflaws — and there are now hundreds of them broadcasting at any given moment in this country — are usually only audible within a few miles of their “home-brewed” transmitters. They find unused sections of the FM dial, fire up their mini-transmitters, raise their antennas and […]

In Belgium, Google is prohibited from even linking to newspaper content. See this story in the International Herald Tribune. It’s beyond idiotic for the newspapers to do this. Google is sending them customers. No wonder the newspaper business is going in the tank. It has leaders who can’t understand fundamental reality.

I spent part of yesterday at a small conference organized by WGBH, the huge Boston-based public broadcasting operation. The topic under discussion was “open media,” which means different things to different people. The ground rules were no blogging, which presumably meant not covering what other people said. A few thoughts, however, about what I told […]