William J. Bennett and Alan M. Dershowitz: A Failure of the Press. We two come from different political and philosophical perspectives, but on this we agree: Over the past few weeks, the press has betrayed not only its duties but its responsibilities. To our knowledge, only three print newspapers have followed their true calling: the […]
Posts under ‘News’
Columnist Corrects His Editorial Page
The Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn thwacks his newspaper’s clueless editorial page: It wasn’t exactly “Dewey defeats Truman,” but the cute valedictory “Bloggy, we hardly knew ye” in a headline atop a Tribune editorial Wednesday seems likely to take a place in history alongside such clouded crystal-ball pronouncements as “Who the hell wants to hear actors […]
Sports Association's Attempt to Control the News
News organizations are beginning to fight back against the absurd and arrogant demands of sports leagues and entertainment conglomerates (often the same entities, in my view). As the Honolulu Star Bulletin notes today, it’s not publishing pictures from the pro golfing tournament being held in its backyard. “The organization wants control over all stories and […]
Calling All Bloggers
Austin-based RSS comany Pluck has just released a demo of a new product called BlogBurst. Essentially a blog wire service, BlogBurst will syndicate content from “pre-approved” blogs to newspaper publishers who pay to opt in. A few forward-thinking newspapers including the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle and San Antonia Express-News have already signed […]
OhmyNews' Global Ambitions Get Boost
Softbank, the Japanese investment company, has invested $11 million in OhmyNews, the pathbreaking Korean online newspaper. The goal, according to the companies: “spreading citizen participatory journalism on the global stage.” This means, for practical purposes in the near term, pursuing the English-language OhmyNews International edition, which has been around for a while but hasn’t gained […]
Seeking An Organized, Public Discussion of Conversation-Tracking
Adam Green: Forming a memetracker community. What I’d like to propose is the creation of a group blog on which Gabe, Kevin, and a few other memetracker creators could discuss their philosophy of what a site of this type should do. There wouldn’t be any discussion of algorithms and “secret sauce,” but surely issues like […]
China, Wikipedia and Asia
This week The Washington Post is running a series on “The Great Firewall of China.” Reporter Phil Pan wrote an excellent piece describing the history of Chinese Wikipedia and the saga of it being blocked three times over the last two years. (It’s still blocked as of this writing.) While the stories in the U.S. […]
Are Tech Industry's Moral Blinders Bad for Business, Too?
My colleagues at the Berkman Center, Rebecca MacKinnon and John Palfrey, have penned an op-ed piece for Newsweek’s international edition called “Censorship Inc.” Takeaway: If we’re not careful, we may wake up one day to discover that what a person can see and do on the Web will be radically different depending on which country […]
The Blog Bubble?
Daniel Gross (Slate): Twilight of the Blogs – Are they over as a business? As a cultural phenomenon, blogs are in their gangly adolescence. Every day, thousands of people around the world launch their blogs on LiveJournal or the Iranian equivalent. But as businesses, blogs may have peaked. There are troubling signs—akin to the 1999 […]
Cheney to American Public: Get Lost
Jay Rosen: Dick Cheney Did Not Make a Mistake By Not Telling the Press He Shot a Guy: He followed procedure— his procedure. As Bill Plante, White House reporter for CBS News said at Public Eye, “No other vice president in the White Houses I’ve covered has had the ability to write his own rules […]