Center for Citizen Media

Lance Dutson, a Maine blogger who has gone after a state tourism agency and its advertising contractor, found himself at the wrong end of a legal gun barrel when the contractor, an ad agency, filed a libel suit that looked from here like raw intimidation.

He fought back, with a lot of help, and now won’t have to go to court after all. As he reports today, the ad agency that sued him withdrew the lawsuit. He says, however:

The story doesn’t end here, we’ll keep pursuing the mismanagement of the MOT and keep fighting for accountability in this industry. And maybe they’ll pay a little more attention now, after having learned this lesson the hard way.

Let’s hope so.

I missed the first day of the We Media conference in London, but Mark Glaser reports (and other participants on the second day confirmed to me) that there was a lot of same old stuff about bloggers versus mainstream. What a shame, and a waste of time.

The second day was, from all accounts, more productive. I particularly learned from several panels devoted to international media developments, such as the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

I’m meeting this morning with several people who have an international focus, and then heading over to the BBC to join several other folks in a luncheon discussion of how the BBC can (or should) embrace citizen media, which the service has already said it plans to do.

In Editor & Publisher’s remarkable story, “Letter Reveals Reason for Firing of Vermont AP Chief,” the news cooperative’s explanation doesn’t begin to pass the smell test.

The story says Christopher Graff

“was terminated for distributing a column by Sen. Patrick Leahy that promoted open public records, according to his termination letter obtained by E&P today. “

Huh? As has been noted before, Graff did almost exactly the same thing last year with no problem. And what on earth is controversial about a press group printing a letter from a prominent public official in a week devoted to press freedom?

I suspect that something else is going on, and we’re not being told what that might be. Because this explanation doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny.

It’s not the competition from bloggers and citizen journalists, as I note in my new BBC column, “The changing mix of money and media,” but rather the way Internet companies are taking away the base of revenue that pays for the journalism.

At the We Media conference in London after two amazing days in Berlin (more below), there are more people wearing ties in this room than at a similar event in New York last year. There are plenty of people blogging this gathering, so I won’t.

In Berlin I worked with 15 journalists from the developing world, from Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Moldova, Nigeria, Serbia, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. They were mostly young, and all extraordinarily motivated and eager not just to listen but to discuss.

One thing we did was to create WordPress blogs from scratch. The organization that sponsored my trip, Inwent, created separate databases for each of them on an internal server. Then we downloaded WordPress and installed it in each of their online spaces. It took only a couple of hours for them to be configuring their sites in many different ways, using the tools available for this, and I expect that at least a few of them will be creating blogs when they get home.

Over on my Bay Area blog, I raise more questions about wheeling and dealing in the regional newspaper market.

I’m heading to Berlin to the International Institute for Journalism, a project that helps train journalists from around the world, mostly developing nations. I’ll be doing a series of lectures and workshops about blogging and citizen journalism over two days, and am planning to have the students (most of whom are already professional journalists) create blogs as part of the program.

The Podcasting Legal Guide calls itself “a general roadmap of some of the legal issues specific to podcasting.”

Great work by all.

Thanks again to Columbia University for inviting me this week to give the annual Hearst New Media Lecture. The audience was terrific and asked great questions (I don’t have a transcript of that part, sorry.) What follows is the talk as I wrote it out, beginning after the various thank-yous to the folks who invited me (special thanks to Sree), though I did stray frequently from the written text. I’ll add the appropriate links as I get the time.

Continue reading →

NY Times: Microsoft, NYT partner on newspaper software. Aiming to offer newspapers a new digital publishing alternative, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Friday touted a software program that tries to make publications easier to read on a computer screen.

Questions:

• Do very many people really want to read the paper’s journalism this way?
• How much will the newspaper(s) charge?
• Will this product include digital restrictions management (DRM) that, for example, prevents saving the stories or copying a section for further (fair) use?
• What is the itch being scratched here, other than herding readers into a system that can be more easily monetized but is less convenient and very likely much more restrictive?
• In other words, what’s really in it for the customers?