Cit Media

San Jose Mercury News: Wanted: Los Gatos bloggers. We’re looking for community bloggers in Los Gatos who can write about such things as events in town, school fundraisers, the score of the latest football game. We need someone who would love a forum for reflecting on the latest buzz story in town, or even write things to do for runners, kids, moms, retirees or other groups in town.

This could be a fairly big deal, especially if it means the paper will do more than just highlight what the bloggers do (i.e. pay them for what they do).

But the very fact that the paper has recognized what has been obvious for years — that the bloggers and others running websites in a community are able to supplement, and in some cases replace, what the newspaper has been doing, or failing to do.

Every newspaper should be a portal to the bloggers, Flickr and YouTube posters and others who are creating media about the towns and neighborhoods in the circulation area. That so few understand this is testament to the industry’s continuing cluelessness.

The Merc is owned by a company that has, from all available evidence, vastly more concern for profit than journalism — a company that appears not to see the value of excellence as a business proposition. So if this move is essentially to get more “content” for less money, it’s a loser.

But to the extent that the Mercury News is recognizing and helping to promote a wider and more diverse media ecosystem, this is a potentially noteworthy move.

Share This

Here’s the Dow Jones “Special Committee’s Statement” about its helplessness — which has been entirely evident from the beginning — in the wake of Murdoch’s ridding himself of the Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, a journalist who was part of the old regime.

Again, it’s his company’s paper now, and he and his team get to make these decisions. But the Not-so-Special Committee was always an unfunny joke, and clearly was designed that way.

These folks get paid $100,000 a year for their supposed work. What a crock.

They are: Susan Phillips, Tom Bray, Louis Boccardi, Jack Fuller and Nicholas Negroponte

They are apparently shameless. How do they look in the mirror?

Share This

Portfolio: How Murdoch Cheated ‘WSJ’ Independence Pact. Only the very naive didn’t expect Rupert Murdoch to find some sly way around the agreement he made to respect The Wall Street Journal’s editorial independence once it was his. But when the time came, there was nothing very sly about it at all: Murdoch just did exactly what he wanted, turfing out managing editor Marcus Brauchli in a way that, arguably, represented a concrete and blatant violation of the independence pact.

Actually, only the naive gave this “editorial independence” committee any credibility whatsoever. It’s Murdoch’s paper. He’s doing exactly what he wants to do with it, and no one should ever have given even a micro-second’s thought to any other possibility. Anyone who spends any more time discussing this committee’s meaningless activities is wasting time.

Share This

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.”

Share This

UPDATED

The Dallas Morning News implores its readers, “Help us examine the lost JFK files.” Why?

Given the volume, we haven’t been able to review most of the files. That’s why were calling on you. Here’s your chance to review never-seen-before materials related to the JFK assassination.

This is a breakthrough in the traditional media — though as Jon Garfunkel notes in his comments below, the implementation leaves a huge amount to be desired.

Some organizations, notably several Gannett papers, have asked for audience help in looking into issues. But as far as I know this is the first time one of them has asked the readers to help analyze a pile of documents.

Nothing new elsewhere, of course; Talking Points Memo has done it many times, to good effect. To see a Big Media company wise up to the audience’s potential, however, is excellent.

Should the DMN pay people who come up with the best material? Yes, as they’d pay freelancers. Complicated, but the right thing to do.

Whether they do or not, this is still a great move.

Share This

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.

Share This

There are plenty of reasons to wonder about citizen media’s business model. One, which I’ve talked about many times here and elsewhere, is the tendency of site owners to rely on free labor. The method goes roughly this way: “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.”

People do things for many reasons, but it’s always about getting something of value back. The value may be a psychic reward of doing something good for someone else. It may be ego. It may be money, or the ability to save money. In community-driven websites it may be contributing a tiny bit of effort to something that gives the overall community, and thereby individuals, great value. Usually it’s a combination.

But when the big money starts to flow to a few who are leveraging the work of the many, a disconnect emerges. And that’s why I’m so bothered by part of an announcement of some interesting new features that will give users or reddit, a news-recommendation site owned by the parent company of Wired magazine, new ways to help each other understand the news. reddit is refining the process in a smart way, by dividing the recommendation system in ways — assuming it works — to make it better and, perhaps, more reliable.

There’s no sense of whether the “private” and “restricted” section of the site, in which the Chosen will presumably elevate the content because they are doing things better, will have any stake in the outcome beyond being given more responsibility. I hope so, and we’ll know more when the features roll out more widely.

What really bugs me most in the reddit blog posting about the changes is the following:

Right now we really only have English and German, but if you would be generous enough to translate reddit into another language, please email feedback@reddit to offer your support.

As usual, if you’re interested in working on reddit, please email jobs@reddit and describe what a badass programmer you are.

Read it again. You are invited to translate the site into another language, because you are such a generous person. If you are a badass programmer, however, you are invited to apply for a job and make some actual money.

I like reddit a lot, and think it’s doing some terrific work with community-driven news. But this request goes beyond the pale.

Conde Nast, a privately held empire that owns some of the most profitable magazines on the planet, paid a bundle for this site. It can afford to pay for translations.

If you are generous enough to do this kind of work for free, please consider doing instead it for a nonprofit site of some sort. Please don’t be giving away your time to mega-wealthy media barons.

Share This

I’m on my way to the DLD Conference — it stands for Digital Life, Design — in Munich. The gathering is held each year by the folks at Hubert Burda Media, one of the most forward-looking media companies on the planet.

The conference is always fascinating, and this one has the look of an especially mind-bending couple of days.

Share This

Jeff Jarvis ably deconstructs a NYT op-ed in which:

A herd of journalism-school deans wrote a predictable but also naive and possibly dangerous — and certainly not strategically forward-thinking — attack on media cross-ownership and the FCC’s loosening of its rules in today’s Times op-ed page.

They do mean well, and they are not off base on the idea that broadcasting’s former public service component has been tossed overboard in recent times.

Of course, the public service mission they wish for was never all that real in the first place. Perversely, the deans appear to be aiming to “save” local news coverage at organizations whose primary contributions to local journalism — in an era when network affiliates had to be run poorly to make less than 50 percent profit margins — is best summed up in the famous aphorism, “If it bleeds it leads.” Where were they when local new disintegrated into pap in the first place?

Even with that, their op-ed is misguided, as Jeff notes. And their brief dismissal of the Internet is just bizarre.

The rise of digital media means, barring a policy disaster, that we will clearly have enough outlets. The big issues are a) how to create new revenue models to support journalism in this medium, which has no scarcity the way old-time broadcasting did; and b) how to prevent new oligopolists from taking over.

We in the journalism education field need to focus on those topics, not whether future governments will force broadcasters to meet licensing terms written for an era of airwave scarcity.

I’m pleased to see that my new boss at Arizona State University is not on the list of deans who signed this piece.

Share This

Times Online: News Corp to tap US faith market with takeover of Beliefnet website. News Corporation, parent company of The Times, bought the leading American religious website Beliefnet yesterday in an effort to tap the faith market in a country where 88 per cent of the population say that they pray regularly.

Is he smart enough not to tamper with this one? Doubtful, but let’s wait and see.

Share This