Center for Citizen Media

Terry Heaton: A blogging pioneer calls it quits. And so extortion has won a victory, and the blogosphere has lost a pioneering voice. Peggy is brusk and competitive and has made her share of enemies, but nobody deserves the kind of personal attacks this site apparently distributed.

Were the attacks libelous? Or merely insulting? I can’t say, because I haven’t seen what prompted this action.

No one can defend the slimy trolls who take such pleasure in polluting cyberspace. But we can resolve to ignore them unless they cross the line into outright libel. A thick skin goes with this territory.

And we can all decide that anonymous postings — especially of this poisonous kind — deserve absolutely no credence. We must assume the people who are too cowardly to stand behind their words in such circumstances are outright liars. The burden of proof is entirely on them; when they snipe from the bushes, they have less than no credibility.

That’s the suggestion in a complex tale surrounding a technology issue in Massachusetts. We’re hearing about this because of some digging by non-journalists, not because the Globe has pursued it very ardently (though the paper is responding, apparently somewhat belatedly, to queries).

This is a great example of the journalism-watchdog role that is so prominent in the citizen media movement. It’s no fun for the organizations that didn’t have to answer to anyone — except lawyers and shareholders — in the past, but it’s a healthy development in the long run.

The Reuters Financial Glossary “has been developed to give you quick and easy access to definitions of terms and concepts related to the financial markets. It is a community-created collaborative project, based upon a published book written and edited by Reuters Editorial staff. Now anyone can edit, build upon and add entries to the glossary to create a helpful source of information.”

Watching this one with interest…

Dave Sifry has posted his State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search. Summary points:

• Blogging and Mainstream Media continue to share attention in blogger’s and reader’s minds, but bloggers are climbing higher on the “big head” of the attention curve, with some bloggers getting more attention than sites including Forbes, PBS, MTV, and the CBC.
• Continuing down the attention curve, blogs take a more and more significant position as the economics of the mainstream publishing models make it cost prohibitive to build many nice sites and media
• Bloggers are changing the economics of the trade magazine space, with strong entries covering WiFi, Gadgets, Internet, Photography, Music, and other nice topic areas, making it easier to thrive, even on less aggregate traffic.
• There is a network effect in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, with a tendency to remain highly linked if the blogger continues to post regularly and with quality content.
• Looking at the historical data shows that the inertia in the Top 100 is very low – in other words, the number of new blogs jumping to the top of the Top 100 as well as he blogs that have fallen out of the top 100 show that the network effect is relatively weak.
• The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.
• Technorati Explore is a new feature that uses the authoritative topical bloggers as a distributed editorial team, highlighting the most interesting blog posts and links in over 2,500 categories.
• The new Filter By Authority slider makes it easy to refine a search and look for either a wider array of thoughts and opinions, or to narrow the search to only bloggers that have lots of other people linking to them. This gives you the power to decide how much filtering you want.

Not only has the New York Times banished its columnists behind its pay-us-first wall, but it’s done the same thing with the terrific Opinionator blog by Chris Sullentrop.

Even more bizarre, each posting has a “Link to This” hyperlink that goes — you guessed it — to the pay-us-first registration page. Can you say “Sheesh…”?

New York Magazine makes a case on this week’s cover, in an article looking in-depth at the business model for blogging. The good news: It is possible to break into the so-called A List, but you have to work hard to get there.

I’ve used up a considerable portion of any positive air-travel karma I might have had before yesterday. While my nonstop flight was canceled from San Francisco to Boston due to the East Coast blizzard, I not only got to Chicago but then had a seat on what I think was the only United flight that made it from Chicago to Boston the entire day. Feeling lucky…you bet.

Hope to see folks this evening at the Berkman/Shorenstein Center talk.

I’m hoping to get to Boston sometime tonight, because I’m giving a talk tomorrow evening at Harvard. My nonstop flight from San Francisco was canceled, but I’m now booked at least as far as Chicago, which is two-thirds of a continent better than just waiting around California for a nonstop.

Wish me luck…

In “Blog Rage“, Jim Brady, editor of the Washington Post’s online operations, asks, “How did it feel to be mugged by the blogosphere?” Not good, he reports.

The piece strikes me as unnecessarily defensive. It makes the mistake of focusing on the relatively few “muggers” instead of the larger reasons why so many people were so upset with the Post and, in particular, its ombudsman, Deborah Howell.

People were angry — some in hateful and outrageous ways, no question — because of a flat-wrong assertion in her column about a matter that inflames people — the political donations of the Republican Party’s sleazy friend, Jack Abramoff — followed by Howell’s initial refusal to forthrightly admit that her error was egregious. She did correct it later, but in a way that was at best grudging, in my view.

Brady points out, correctly, that the Abramoff scandal’s unveiling is due in large part to the Post’s own reporting: brilliant and dogged tracking of this sleazy activity that should make the paper proud. But he doesn’t acknowledge that the Post’s online arm enabled the hate-fest by not making its comment system more robust and less prone to gaming. (He knows about the problem, having told me so in a recent email.) Brady somewhat undermines his complaints with this omission.

Traditional news organizations are learning how to deal with the kind of harsh feedback that bloggers get every day. A thicker skin helps, but better is a willingness to truly listen.

I think the Post is doing better online than all but a handful of other newspapers. It can do better yet.

UPDATED

I’ve been a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal’s online edition ever since the news organization started charging for it. The price has risen again and again, but I’ve found the value worth the cost.

The site included Barron’s, the weekly financial newspaper that has been a sister publication under Dow Jones parentage. I didn’t read the Barron’s stories all that avidly, but I did periodically look at them and enjoyed what I saw.

Until a few weeks ago, that is — when Barron’s suddenly disappeared behind a pay-wall of its own. Suddenly, something I’d been paying for was missing.

Understand what happened here. It’s not as if I reached the end of my subscription period (mine ends in June or July) and was told that the new subscription would no longer include Barron’s. This was different: Something I’d been paying for suddenly disappeared in the middle of the subscription period.

I was sure there had to be some mistake. I mean, would the Wall Street Journal, the watchdog of capitalism, do such a thing?

On Jan. 27, I sent an e-mail to the WSJ online people asking for an explanation. On Feb. 7, I received this response:

We can confirm that as of January 8, 2006, Barron’s Online became a standalone publication rather continuing as a feature included within The Wall Street Journal Online.

As with any publication, our editorial content and features change from time to time, and we regularly add and, in cases such as this one, remove, content and features. We have added substantial value to both the Online Journal and Barron’s Online sites over the past few years, through ongoing additions and improvements to online exclusive content, tools, data and archives.

In the past year, Barron’s Online has added many more online exclusive features, including The Inside Scoop, Charting the Market Today and Hulbert on Markets. With this re-launch, the site is also adding brand-new stock rating, screening and search tools.

In the months ahead we plan to add more new features, columns and tools to Barron’s Online to make it even more valuable. As part of this process, subscribers must choose whether to continue their access to Barron’s Online and we are giving them a substantial discount to the regular price of Barron’s Online. Due to the timing of this in conjunction with the re-launch, and the limited-time nature of the special offer, this may not match the timing of subscribers’ renewal dates.

We hope you will explore all the valuable features that Barron’s Online has to offer. If you have questions or would like more information, please contact our Customer Service Department at 1-800-369-2834 (or 609-514-0870) from 7am – 12 midnight ET, Monday-Friday.

In other words, pay again for what I’ve been paying for, and too bad if I don’t like it.

Dow Jones’ position is essentially this: I was getting Barron’s for free, a bonus on top of what I was paying for. Now that they’ve decided to charge, the bonus is gone.

As I responded to the company’s e-mail, this is the rough equivalent of having my local newspaper decide to stop delivering the Sunday edition unless I forked over more money — before the current subscription had run out — and replacing it with a local shopper-paper full of nothing but advertisements.

I don’t see anything in the Subscriber Agreement that permits Dow Jones to do this. Nor, I concede, do I see anything that doesn’t permit such a stunt.

There was a simple way — an ethical way — to handle the decision to start charging separately for Barron’s. The Journal and Dow Jones could have told subscribers about the change when they were about to renew their subscriptions. Instead, the company chose to take away what people believed they’d paid for. What would it have cost to do the right thing?

There will be a cost for doing the wrong thing. Like at least a few other folks who’ve been burned, I’m planning to cancel my subscription.

No news organization celebrates capitalism, nor tries so hard to keep it honest, as well as the Wall Street Journal. Its management should be ashamed at pulling a stunt like this.

UPDATE: The Journal has sent me a new e-mail, almost identical to the last one, with this additional paragraph:

We value your business and want you to be satisfied with your subscription, so as a courtesy, we would be happy to offer you continued access to both The Wall Street Journal Online and Barron’s Online until your next renewal date. However, upon your next renewal, you will be required to pay for a subscription to each product that you wish to continue to access.

This is absolutely fine with me — and precisely what I believed should have been done in the first place. I hope other unhappy subscribers pursue the same deal.

(Note: This posting has nothing to do with the Journal’s story last week about bloggers and disclosures, in which the paper unfairly implied that several colleagues and friends had acted unethically. I’d sent my subscription query nearly two weeks earlier. But I figure if I don’t mention it here, someone will incorrectly conclude that this posting has some connection. Again: The issues are entirely separate, and I still respect the Journal enormously as a journalism institution despite these disagreements.)