Center for Citizen Media

San Jose Mercury News: Apple loses appeals court battle over leaked information. Applying strong First Amendment protections to bloggers and Web site operators, a San Jose-based appeals court today rejected Apple Computer’s bid for the identities of individuals who leaked confidential information on one of its new products.

In a 69-page ruling, the 6th District Court of Appeal broke new ground by concluding that bloggers and web masters enjoy the same protections against divulging confidential sources as established media organizations. The decision sets up a likely challenge in the California Supreme Court.

This is big and important news for bloggers and other citizen journalists. Apple’s control-freakery has been, temporarily, held up for what it is.

Disclosure: I filed (unpaid) declarations in this case, at the request of the lawyers for the Web sites, saying that in my opinion they were engaged in journalism that should be protected.

Here’s the full decision (184K pdf). Key quote:

We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes “legitimate journalis[m].”  The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here.  We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish “legitimate” from “illegitimate” news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace.

They get it.

Later…

Nicholas Carr announces “The death of Wikipedia” in a tendentious posting that doesn’t begin to prove his point. He does point out, fairly, that some of the Wikipedia rhetoric has not matched reality (such as the flat statement that anyone can edit anything; there are some speed bumps and a few trolls are banned outright).

But his own rhetoric, which some commenters call trolling (I disagree), is surprisingly free of depth, given his record for thoughtful commentary.

Wikipedia is not, and has never been, perfect. It has always had flaws. I would never suggest that anyone use it as a single source of information, and anyone who made a big decision based on what’s posted there is a fool (just as it would be foolish to make a major life decision based even on what is in today’s New York Times; some things you have to check out for yourself).

But the questions about Wikipedia that its critics aren’t interested in asking are whether a) it’s better than nothing (it is); b) is improving (it is); and c) helps people understand the value of online collaboration (it does).

They seem to fear the idea of edge-in work that sometimes, not always but defintely sometimes, produces something better than what the annointed — through titles, degrees and, yes, achievement — might have done. I don’t understand their paranoia, and worry that it gives support to the centralizers of our world, the people who want control and don’t want the rest of us to make our own decisions and tell each other what we know.

Carr insists that a few speed bumps and modest policing shows that the wisdom of the crowd is bogus, that a top-down hierarchy will always be necessary. The model he embraces is an old one, designed for a manufacturing economy.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s benevolent monarch, governs with the lightest possible touch. To suggest that this is resembles a traditional hierarchy misses what is new in the collaborative world we now can share. In an open system such as Wikipedia, where no one owns the result, anyone can take the pages — all of them — and create a new ‘pedia for himself. Try that with most projects, and you’ll get arrested.

Wikipedia’s leaders can exert their “control” only with the absolute consent of the “controlled” in the community. This is a crucial distinction.

Again, Wikipedia is not perfect. But it is a valuable resource, and is getting better. That matters.

(Note: Jimmy Wales is a member of this Center’s board of advisors, and I am an investor in a company he has founded.)

The Wall Street Journal is running an online discussion — Should the Net Be Neutral? — between Craig Newmark of craigslist fame and Mike McCurry, former Bill Clinton press secretary and now lobbyist and PR consultant. Craig (an advisor and contributor to this center) takes the side of neutrality. McCurry takes the side of his employers, the telecoms that want to re-architect the Net to make it more like TV.

More on this later…

In New York City for a media roundtable tomorrow morning at the Museum of Television & Radio. The discussion will be about combining opinion with journalism, and whether it’s a good idea.

Mark Glaser asks if this is the case. This calls for some serious sleuthing. Anyone want to help?

Over at buffalo rising are quotes from the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, at which Warren Buffett said, among other things:

It may be that no one has followed the newspaper business as closely as we have for as long as we have—50 years or more. It’s been interesting to watch newspaper owners and investors resist seeing what’s going on right in front of them. It used to be you couldn’t make a mistake managing a newspaper. It took no management skill—like TV stations. Your nephew could run one.

I’m not especially surprised that newspapers haven’t covered these remarks. (Imagine if Buffett had said such things about, say, the soft-drink business, in which he’s also invested significantly over the years.)

Buffett also said:

Certain newspaper executives are going out and investing on other newspapers. I don’t see it. It’s hard to make money buying a business that’s in permanent decline. If anything, the decline is accelerating. Newspaper readers are heading into the cemetery, while newspaper non-readers are just getting out of college. The old virtuous circle, where big readership draws a lot of ads, which in turn draw more readers, has broken down.

This is a direct shot at MediaNews and McClatchy, the companies making deals right and left over the old Knight Ridder empire. McClatchy is buying KR, but spinning off major properties to MediaNews, including the San Jose Mercury News, my old employer.

The New York Times has a report today, in fact, on the CEO of MediaNews, Dean Singleton. He says he’s going to turn the Mercury News into a laboratory for Internet journalism and make deals with Yahoo and Google, among others.

(I recently proposed that Yahoo buy the Merc and turn it into a journalism laboratory. The suggestion was considered for maybe two minutes inside the Internet company before being discarded as hopelessly retrograde.)

Maybe he’ll figure out how the industry will make it into this century. Or maybe not; I just don’t see how the unraveling business model can be sustained in a way that keeps the journalists employed in sufficient numbers.

Buffett’s been wrong on some of his investments, and I hope that’s the case this time. But I’m having trouble seeing how he’s wrong on this one.

(Disclosure: I’m a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder.)

Legal Times: Numbers Game: Gonzales Launches DOJ Project Safe Childhood With Mysterious Figure. (NBC News correspondent Chris) Hansen’s source, according to the “Dateline” report: unnamed “law enforcement officials.” Asked who those law enforcement officials were, Hansen told Legal Times that “this is a number that was widely used in law enforcement circles,” though he couldn’t specify by whom or where.

As NBC News continues to embarrass itself with its Dateline “predator” series — including unethical payments for help in pulling off stings — now it turns out that the network is basing a key baseline statistic on hocus-pocus.

But hey, ratings are everything. Who cares about accuracy in today’s TV journalism world, anyway?

TruthOut: The Rove Indictment Story as of Right Now. The time has now come, however, to issue a partial apology to our readership for this story. While we paid very careful attention to the sourcing on this story, we erred in getting too far out in front of the news-cycle.

This kind of thing should make journalists of all stripes, online and traditional, cringe. TruthOut stated, without the slightest hedging, that Karl Rove had been indicted, citing a variety of unnamed sources. Now it’s sort of, kind of, backing off the story. See this deconstruction of the TruthOut semi-retraction by Salon’s Tim Grieve for details on the journalistic perversity involved.

As part of the series of columns I’m writing for BBC News, I answer readers’ questions every fortnight (that’s British for every other week). Here’s the latest set of questions and answers from this column, which appeared two weeks ago.