Center for Citizen Media

NY Times: Oprah Calls Defense of Author ‘a Mistake’. In an extraordinary reversal of her strident and angry defense of the author whose book she catapulted to the top of the best-seller list, Oprah Winfrey said today she believed that the author James Frey “betrayed millions of people” by making up elements of his life in his best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.” She added that she believed “I made a mistake” when she said that the truth of the book mattered less then its story of redemption.

This is admirable. Winfrey understands several things that so many other people do not:

First, what Frey did is simply dishonest. Any other way of characterizing his deceit is itself dishonest. He shames his craft, and himself, but continuing to claim that what he meant — in a book called a supposedly true “memoir” — is more important than facts.

Second, Winfrey shows the power of admitting a mistake. We all make them. But when we we recognize and own up to our errors, we boost our credibility.

UPDATE: Salon has video excerpts from the show, including this one in which Frey’s publisher defends the sleazy tricks. Truth versus money, and money wins. Sheesh.

As usual, my new colleague Rebecca MacKinnon serves up the best round-up and commentary on Google’s cave-in to China’s government. Key quote:

At the end of the day, this compromise puts Google a little lower on the evil scale than many other internet companies in China. But is this compromise something Google should be proud of? No. They have put a foot further into the mud. Now let’s see whether they get sucked in deeper or whether they end up holding their ground.

Hoder says he’s “going to Israel as a citizen journalist and a peace activist. A lot of us will be watching what happens next.

The Washington Post online executive editor, Jim Brady, just let me know what’s what regarding the comments situation. He says the site wasn’t requiring a valid e-mail address from commenters:

because we were working through Movable Type, and we had not synched up our registration system with it. But we are hoping to add comments to articles reasonably soon, and when we do that, we’ll have that layer of security. But, after the events of the past week, we now know we need that layer on our MT blogs as well. Lesson learned, I guess. We’ve had these blogs up for a year, and really had no problems, so this one caught us off-guard and understaffed. But we’ll be back on the horse before long; it’s obviously the right thing to do.

This is good news, because it shows that the Post does understand what went wrong and is working to fix it — and to bring reader comments back to the site, where they belong.

This is fairly amazing, when you think about it…

UPDATED

In her new column, “The Firestorm Over My Column,” the Washington Post’s Ombudsman, Deborah Howell says, “So is it the relative anonymity of the Internet that emboldens e-mailers to conduct a public stoning? Is this the increasing political polarization of our country? I don’t know.”

Both are true, but the problem with the Post’s comment section, as far as I can tell, wasn’t the fact that idiots were posting. It’s that the Post seems not to have set up the comment system with sufficient due diligence.

The newspaper didn’t respond to my e-mailed query, but I did hear from someone who read my previous posting on this bizarre controversy and has a reason to know what’s going on there. This person wrote:

I do not believe post.com has any kind of registration system in place for comments. It’s basically a simple “enter name, enter comment, submit” system. There’s no e-mail check of any kind. And it’s definitely not linked to their site registration system.

In other words, they failed Blog Comments 101 (which so many media companies seem to do) by allowing freeform comments without forcing the commenter over any sort of hurdle that would provide accountability.

Unbelievable!

That’s putting it mildly.

To repeat what I said before, comments are worth the trouble, if done right. Why?

Because listening and responding are as important in tomorrow’s journalism as speaking. If we forget that, even bigger trouble lies ahead.

UPDATE: The New York Times’ media columnist, David Carr, also trashes the commenters. He ends his piece — with what he probably meant as an ironic touch, but comes off as merely arrogant — with an invitation to send comments via the U.S. Postal Service. “And don’t forget that the price of stamps just went up,” he taunts. Wow…

Lots of folks are posting about this event and using the Technorati Tags to help us all keep track of it. My part of the program is over, and I’m now in a listening mode.

I’m heading to Munich later today for Hubert Burda Media’s “Digital Lifestyle Day” gathering on Monday and Tuesday. Limited postings from me, therefore, for the next day or so…

PressThink: Transparency at the Post. When Jim Brady decides to shut down the comments at post.blog to prevent even bigger problems we’re going backwards in our ability to have a conversation with the Washington Post. That isn’t good. If the press decides to close itself off because the costs of participating in the new openness are judged to be too high, that is a loss for everyone.

Jay Rosen’s Q&A with Brady, executive editor of the Washington Post’s online news operation, is a fascinating look into how one Big Media organization dealt with the inevitable trouble when it opened up its blog to comments.

I’d like to know if the Post required commenters to provide a valid email address as a bare-bones registration system, which would have been a deterrent to the most flagrant trolling (it’s easier to ban someone in such a circumstance). If the Post allowed anonymous comments, then it was asking for trouble. I’ve asked about this and will let you know what I find out.

But comments are definitely worth having, even when they cause problems. Listening and responding are as important in tomorrow’s journalism as speaking. If we forget that, even bigger trouble lies ahead.

As we work to build the Center for Citizen Media in coming weeks and months, we envision three basic missions. They are:

• Research, Analysis, Advocacy: Working in-house and in collaboration with others, we will do or commission original research into some of the key questions surrounding citizen media, such as its impact on public knowledge and opinion. We must also understand the genre’s future, and will highlight factors that could either help or deter its development; these include financial sustainability, legal issues and international adoption. Simultaneously, we will speak out on the need for responsible citizen media and its value in a democracy.
• Best Practices and Tools: We’ll catalog the people and organizations working in the citizens’ media sphere, and highlight their work on our Web site, flagging what look like the best for special attention. We’ll identify the technological tools that people will be using in creating tomorrow’s journalism and other media, in part by working with technologists to help them add appropriate features. These tools, too, will be highlighted online, again with special attention to the ones that appear to work best. The website will also become a test bed (or playground) for trying out various methods.
• Education, Training, Consulting: We’ll work with people at all levels of citizen journalism — citizens who want to participate in the process; media professionals who want to use these technologies and want to work with citizens; companies that need to understand what is happening; and others.

We hope this site will be a place where people discuss ideas, techniques, tools and more. What you know is considerably more than what we know, and we need to help each other learn.

Two reminders:

First, we won’t be the only people doing such work, and are anxious to collaborate with others. Without your ideas, and your help, we won’t get nearly as much done as we’d like.

Second, we are not the Center OF Citizen Media — that’s an oxymoron in an increasingly decentralized media ecosystem. We are a Center FOR Citizen Media. There is a world of difference.