Center for Citizen Media

Reuters: Disney to make TV shows available free on Web. Walt Disney Co.’s ABC Television will offer some of its most popular shows, such as “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost,” for free on the Internet in a two-month trial, the company said on Monday. Advertising revenue will support the trial run on ABC.com, with advertisers AT&T Inc., Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble Co. and Universal Pictures already signed up.

This is an extremely big deal if ABC keeps the experiment going and modifies the model a bit. The force-fed advertising won’t fly, ultimately, because viewers just won’t want it. (I’d imagine that employers are not going to be thrilled, not if people in cubicles start spending parts of the day watching TV episodes.)

It is impossible to imagine the previous regime at Disney letting this happen. Robert Iger, the new CEO, is plainly a different breed — and he deserves some kudos for pushing the broadcast envelope.

Washington Post: NBC newsmagazine paid pedophile watchdog group to run sting. The NBC newsmagazine “Dateline” agreed to pay a civilian watchdog group more than $100,000 to create a pedophile sting operation that the network plans to feature in a series of programs next month, network representatives and the organization’s founder said.

People at NBC and General Electric, the network’s owner, should lose their jobs over this slimy, money-grubbing activity. But I doubt they will, which will tell us a great deal about the company’s ethics.

Steve Outing asks: “Does a new form of journalism require a new business model?”

Read his answers here.

(Note: Outing is a member of our Board of Advisors; see also the disclosure page.)

The Center for Citizen Media is going to be looking hard at the current state of the art in grassroots content. Over time, we aim to look broadly and deeply at who’s getting into it and why.

As part of that research, of the first things we’re going to examine closely is what traditional media organizations are doing — beyond staff-created blogs and podcasts — to truly involve their audiences in the journalism process. We’ll be posting more details about this survey, including a request for your ideas on how we can best accomplish our goals, next week.

Craig Newmark, a member of the Center’s Board of Advisors, has made a donation to jump-start the project. This will help us pay for some Web development and student-researcher work. We’re delighted, and grateful.

Here’s my latest BBC News column about the changes in media: “Why we are all reporters now.”

Yale Information Society Project: Yale Law School will bring together leading thinkers and activists on access to knowledge policy from North and South, in order to generate concrete research agendas and policy solutions for the next decade.

Center for Media and Democracy: Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed. Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms’ use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)—a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population. The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients’ messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety.

This is old-fashioned reporting at its best. But this time the people being reported on are TV “news” shows that have abandoned their principles.

Bad news all around…

I realize it’s only about money. The $15-million-per-year Katie Couric will anchor CBS News’ evening headlines program, and CBS figures her presence will pay for itself and more.

She’s a talented journalist, to be sure. But her hiring is so, well, 20th Century. CBS is competing for something that is disappearing. I’d have put the money the future of the news: namely the variety of platforms the network needs to understand and the audiences it needs to serve and involve.

An opportunity lost…

Washington Post: For Future Readers, Papers Should Look Online. The newspaper industry may be afflicted with declining circulation, falling stock prices and for-sale signs, but two reports issued yesterday suggest newspapers can find new hope in their Web sites.

The title is “Democracy and Independence,” and it’s taking place in Amherst, Mass., at the end of June.