Center for Citizen Media

(This is the eleventh in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

So far the Citizen Media Business Issues series has concerned itself with business models and sources of revenue. While this information is probably most interesting to those of you who already have some sort of web presence, it may also be a good idea for someone in the planning stages of a website to have some semblance of a business plan in mind at the start. With the next several postings, we’ll look at some slightly more technical issues related to creating your product or service.

How you approach things, including the question of whether you are trying to make money or not, comes into play when picking a web host, registering a domain name, deciding what type of site to use, and designing the layout. Web hosts do not all have the same stance on matters of free speech. Some don’t allow advertising. Others may limit your ability to customize the appearance of your site. In addition, what happens to your readers and what recourse do you have if your host goes down repeatedly or your domain name is snatched from under you on the day it expires? The decisions you make early on can have significant impacts on your success-both financial and in terms of readership.

In addition to those topics, we’ll also be looking a bit deeper at how you might want to develop your new site (such as a good place to learn the basics of HTML). It’s often difficult to tackle even a small design issue (like tastefully inserting a banner ad) with no knowledge of the technical side of the web.

If there is a particular issue you would like to see answered, feel free to email it to Ryan or leave it in a comment here. The next post on domain names should be appearing in about a week.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

On the All Things Digital site I have a piece today about tools that will help transform journalism. This one’s called “iPhone 2.0–Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two” — and the debate is still on.

Bill Moyers is headlining the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis, and just gave a powerful pitch for network neutrality and why journalism’s future is key to the future of democracy. There’s a live stream, worth watching.

The conference is a gathering of mostly left-of-center media activists. That’s too bad in a way, because there are plenty of people on the political right who want media reform, too. They may want a different kind, and for different purposes. But there’s enough common ground that it would be valuable to have a more diverse community here.

Back to Moyers: “The press remains in denial of their role,” he accurately says. The big problem is not allowing competing narratives to emerge.

On Iraq, he again approvingly cites my former Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) colleagues who were the singular journalistic heroes in the Iraq war run-up. For the most part, “the Fourth Estate has become a Fifth Column” for the government, he says — a bit over the top but not enormously so, given what we saw during the media’s shabby recent performance.

He speaks powerfully of democracy’s reliance taming the grossest extremes of poverty and wealth, of not allowing the wealthy to control the law and the lawmakers. In this room he’s preaching — and he’s a former preacher, which is evident in his cadences — to a like-minded choir.

“It’s up to you to tell the truth about this country that we love,” he says.

From the New York Times homepage a few minutes ago:

Sigh…

The Knight Ridder, now McClatchy, Washington Bureau was a singular hero among journalists who value great reporting and honor back during the run-up to the Iraq war and its disastrous prosecution. I was, and remain, honored to have been employed by the same company during that period when so many other journalists abandoned their duties.

Now, in the aftermath of the Scott McClellan book, the bureau goes after the continuing unwillingness of those same media people to own up to their failures. In the Nukes & Spooks blog, McClatchy’s Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay write, among other things:

The news media have been, if anything, even more craven than the administration has been in defending its failure to investigate Bush’s case for war in Iraq before the war.

Read the piece, which has voluminous documentation of the bureau’s great work. And you’ll understand why I was proud to be associated with these journalists — and why I, like so many others who care desperately about the vital craft, fear for our republic in the wake of the ongoing scandal.

That’s former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s description of Big Journalism during the Bush administration, especially during the run-up to the Iraq war. With all too few exceptions, it is true — and indelibly stains a craft from which we expect so much more.

McClellan is no hero. He might have helped save lives and treasure had he told the truth when it counted. He, too, was an enabler of staggeringly dishonest tragedy.

All governments lie, to one degree or another. But the press is supposed to do its job, to ask the hard and sometimes dangerous questions that pull truth from dissembling public officials. You don’t expect shame from the politicians.

You should expect it from journalists who fail so miserably at their vital work. Sadly, frighteningly, you don’t get it from this crew.

The news so far from the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference is Bill Gate’s unintentionally hilarious comment in last night’s show-opening interview, in which he said: “Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete.”

Who knew?

Ballmer and Gates teased the next version of Windows, showing some multitouch features that have appeared on Apple’s iPhone. Interesting, but people asked, “Is that all?” Best coverage is from Wired News.

Director Sydney Pollack is has died. He made many excellent films, but the one that journalists remember best is “Absence of Malice” — a trenchant look at big-city journalism and its practitioners.

Yes, the picture was over the top in key ways. But it had a core of reality, cloaked in fiction, that went to the heart of what we do well and what we do badly. It reminded us of things we need to remember, most notably that our sources use us mercilessly to advance their own agendas, not necessarily the public good.

You’ll find it in New York magazine’s brief Q&A With Thomas Bray, Chair of the Editorial Integrity Committee. Bray and his fellow committee members each get $100,000 a year for their lapdog duties, which involve a meeting every three months and “a fair amount of conference calling and so on…”

Actually, it’s amazing that Bray had the nerve to do this little interview.

Looks like it: ABC “Exclusive” On McCain and the Anti-Islam Pastor: Was MoJo Robbed?