Center for Citizen Media

Letter From Bill Keller on The Times’s Banking Records Report : The press and the government generally start out from opposite corners in such cases. The government would like us to publish only the official line, and some of our elected leaders tend to view anything else as harmful to the national interest.

Wall Street Journal: Flag-Burning Debate Reclaims Spotlight. Polls tend to show that the flag issue is relatively low among voter priorities. Some voters who favor the amendment feel strongly about it, and the issue could make a difference in tight races, particularly in conservative-leaning states.

This exercise is a direct attack on free speech. Many of the backers are no doubt sincere, but do they realize they are carving a huge hole in the First Amendment? For some, maybe that’s the point.

Shooting War is a brilliant example of what could become a Web staple: graphic novels translated to a medium that is almost perfect for the genre. There’s a daily installment, and it’s addictive.

This one posits an all-too-possible scenario of the future, which I won’t describe here. It’s heavy-handed at times, which is the point, no doubt, and contains some of the most trenchantly accurate views of Big Media you’ll see this year.

Be sure to look at the “trailer” at the top of the home page. Too bad the entire novel isn’t done that way, with audio and animation as an integral part of the production.

Slate’s Jack Shafer, in “Newspapers are dying, but the news is thriving,” writes:

Newspapers whose readers are as much constituents as they are readers are the best bets to thrive as they decline. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times will remain musts for a long time. Luckily for the (Washington) Post, it should continue to be required reading for government employees, lawyers, lobbyists, other journalists, and the new-class types at nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and universities. Might one of the Detroit dailies eventually navigate a profitable path out of the decline by focusing more heavily on the auto industry?

The days have long since passed when Detroit was the true center of the auto industry. The concept here is a good one, however — but it really has less to do with the print product than the Web.

Look at the Washington Post. As Online Journalism Review noted last year, the paper’s:

print edition remains a local animal, with only the National Weekly Edition circulating broadly outside the capital. Instead, washingtonpost.com has basically become the national and international edition of the paper while also serving a huge slice of the local constituency.

This is the smart move. The Post online, given the right kinds of investments, could win big. As a political portal, the Post isn’t there yet. But the people inside the place seem to understand their opportunity.
They can turn the Post’s online operation into the place to come for the best American political coverage, a site where people all over the world will find key news and interpretation of what’s going on inside the globe’s most influential capital. Now that is a franchise, or could be.

This, in a different context, is what we were trying at the San Jose Mercury News in the 1990s. We realized we were in the epicenter of the major economic and business story of the era: the rise of the technology industry to global prominence. For a time, we turned the Mercury into one of the must-look publications for anyone who cared about what was happening in the tech world.

What we missed, however, was nailing the online component, namely the “vertical” website that Knight Ridder ran and, until next week’s sale of the company to McClatchy, still runs: SiliconValley.com. This was a golden opportunity for the company to capitalize on something we’d been handed on a plate, our location and ability to set a baseline.

SiliconValley.com relied mostly on the coverage from the Mercury, with some add-ons like my blog and the still-great Good Morning Silicon Valley blog. But there was no serious inclination to leverage the name, location and potential in a major way. So, largely because Knight Ridder never invested the proper resources, SiliconValley.com never achieved the kind of critical mass that establishes a serious franchise. We might still have been clobbered by CNET and other media that cared only about tech, but we’d have been a serious player.

In his piece, Shafer is pessimistic about how a regional paper like the Philadelphia Inquirer will endure the huge changes. And he questions whether the Los Angeles Times could survive on the comparative advantage of covering the entertainment and aerospace industries, two of the local mainstays that have global followings, at least with anything like the profitability, much less circulation, that it has today. I doubt it, too.

Where I question Shafer’s analysis is when he implies that people’s insatiable appetite for information (he calls it “news”) will save journalism. This is a business question, not a matter of whether people want to read news. Will they pay, or, alternately, will someone else pay a subsidy (e.g. advertising) to keep them in the audience? The answer to the first question seems to be, Not very often. The second is difficult because advertisers are going to more targeted kinds of advertising places, such as eBay and craigslist. The business issue is more troubling than the journalism one, and will remain so.

At the Sunlight Foundation, Bill Allison has been uncovering remarkable facts about House Speaker Dennis Hastert and his land dealings back home. Great reporting, and unpersuasive responses from Hastert’s defenders.

Now the foundation is looking for citizen reporters to investigate the other members. Recommended if you have the inclination.

A terrific project called News21 — sponsored by two major foundations to help figure out the future of journalism education (and maybe journalism itself) — is under way. This is an important initiative, bringing in students and faculty from five major universities in a multi-year effort that involves some serious journalism about the intersection of security and liberty. I’m proud to be assisting them in developing citizen-media components for their projects, which vary by school and media types.

One of the early pieces of this many-moving-parts project is a blog by students (including recent graduates) from the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, which is one of the two major affiliations of this Center. Their project (in their words):

The American military is in the midst of a profound shift in strategy that is reshaping the military’s presence, and in many cases, its mission, around the world. Older, permanent bases are downsizing or being restructured; newer, smaller and more flexible bases, in places new to American troops, are being created. We are looking for ways to tell stories—cultural, economic, political and environmental—about the nearly half million men and women serving the security interests of the United States overseas.

The students have fanned out across the globe for their on-the-ground reporting, which ultimately will be used to produce broadcast-quality journalism. But one way they’re learning to tell this story is through a blog, US Military Abroad, on which you’ll find a good example of group blogging. And (update) don’t miss their Korea blog.
Other project blogs include:

• Privacy, Civil Liberties and Homeland Security (Medill School, Northwestern University)
• Immigration Outpost (Annenberg School, University of Southern California)
• Homeland Security Money Trail (Columbia University)

Seems to me that traditional media organizations could learn something from this, too.

The Metro, a weekly paper in San Jose, asked me a bunch of questions, I answered them here.

Arrived for the second day, or part of it (I’m shuttling back to Supernova as well), of BloggerCon, and the session is all about tools.

As promised, the audience is the expert panel, not a panel. Phil Torrone of Make magazine is a great MC. I’ve now learned about several podcasting tools I didn’t know about before I arrived. Fantastic session.

This is the format we’ll be using on August 7 at Harvard Law School for the one-day citizen-journalism session. Much more to come on that soon…

He’s not leaving the field, but the New York Times’ redeployment of Len Apcar, editor in chief of nytimes.com, to the International Herald Tribune — memo here on Poynter site — means that one of the newspaper business’ real online innovators will not be focusing on this arena.

I hope this is what he wants. It’s not what the online journalism world necessarily needs.

The phone companies are behind a slew of anti-network neutrality TV ads I saw in Washington the other evening. It was unfortunate that their commercials, aimed at Congress and staffs on Capitol Hill, are designed not to enlighten but rather to obfuscate.

An honest debate is not what we’re getting, sorry to say. And with the exceptions of the telecom companies and their entertainment friends, we’ll all be losers if they get their way — as now seems all too likely.