Times Online: News Corp to tap US faith market with takeover of Beliefnet website. News Corporation, parent company of The Times, bought the leading American religious website Beliefnet yesterday in an effort to tap the faith market in a country where 88 per cent of the population say that they pray regularly.
Is he smart enough not to tamper with this one? Doubtful, but let’s wait and see.
Follow the links from Electronic Frontier Foundation page on the bizarre Manalapan v. Moskovitz lawsuit to see a local government running wild against free speech. The town is suing to get the identity of — and all kinds of other information about — a critical anonymous blogger.
Anonymous speech should generally be taken less seriously than speech where the speaker stands behind his own words, and I think this is such a case. But anonymous speech is part of a long and vital tradition in America, and this is also such an example.
Someone should show these officials the Bill of Rights. Kudos to the EFF for pursuing this case.
Rebecca MacKinnon: Is Web2.0 a wash for free speech in China? Lately I’ve given a few talks around town titled “Will the Chinese Communist Party Survive the Internet?” My answer – for the short and medium term at least – is “yes.”
Western media pundits and many policymakers have a tendency to assume that the Internet will ultimately bring democracy to China. As for the long run, I think China will change. But I doubt China’s political evolution will follow the same pattern as the West. I am not convinced that, if China eventually becomes more pluralistic, it will necessarily involve the same political structures as Western democracies. Lately I’ve been wondering whether the Internet and mobile technologies could be major contributing factors to why China will evolve differently.
Jeff Jarvis ably shreds NY Times editor Bill Keller’s straw men. Sadly, Keller and other major media people are still making this a bloggers against professional journalists question, which is not the question at all, or at least hasn’t been for anyone who actually knows anything about the development of new media.
Sheesh.
The New York Times, eschewing bogus journalism, takes on the raft of falsehoods Rudy Guiliani has been peddling to sell his presidential candidacy — and does it without the standard he-said, she-said mincing of words. In “Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again,” reporter Michael Cooper cites “facts” that
are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong. And while, to be sure, all candidates use misleading statistics from time to time, Mr. Giuliani has made statistics a central part of his candidacy as he campaigns on his record.
There’s chapter and verse here. This, folks, is what serious journalism is all about.
The furor surrounding Joe Klein’s misguided column of a week ago continues, incredibly, given Klein’s bizarre insistence on digging the hole deeper instead of forthrightly acknowledging error(s) and moving on. But this is not just about a columnist’s mistakes and tone-deafness. This is a debacle for the publication and company that employs him, because Time itself has compounded the problem, demonstrating contempt for its audience.
The episode is also a testament to the power of the Net to surface traditional-media wrongdoing — and to hold to account the people who have (and, despite the rise of citizen media, still have) enormous influence over what people believe about key issues. It’s almost inconceivable that Klein and his employers would have even bothered to issue their half-baked corrections had this all occurred a decade ago or earlier.
To recap a bit:
Klein’s original column attacked congressional Democrats’ effort to pass electronic surveillance legislation that would restrain the Bush administration’s wish for essentially no restraints or oversight whatever. In his piece, Klein got some vital facts dead wrong, giving a totally misleading message to his readers.
The responses from the Web were swift and, for the most part, far better informed. In particular, Salon’s fierce blogger, Glenn Greenwald, and Wired News’ Ryan Singel in the site’s Threat Level blog — both of whom are employed by online journalism operations — thoroughly dissected Klein’s factual and logical mess. Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake was among many in the independent blogosphere to join the fray.
Klein dug a deeper hole with a series of follow-up and factually challenged Time blog postings, in one of which he admitted not having actually read the legislation in question. It took him days to admit actual error, but even then he — and Time, in a correction that was and remains half-hearted at best — never fully owned up to the serious failure in this case.
The Chicago Tribune, which published excerpts from Klein’s erroneous column, published a direct and honest correction. Time still refuses, which makes the magazine’s failures much worse than Klein’s.
Why? Because as Singel notes in “Time Edits Wiretapping Correction, Still Wrong,” as he explains why the “correction” is itself so misleading:
For Time to continue to allow people to believe that that’s possibly what this bill would do means after all the detailed criticism it has gotten is clear proof the original column is no longer a dangerous misunderstanding of a complex issue by a two-bit political columnist.
Instead, it’s now an institutional lie.
I don’t know if this story will have further legs. Given the utter unprofessionalism it betrays, it should. But even if it doesn’t, something important has occurred.
Not so many years ago, this institutional arrogance would have been the end of the story. Actually, it’s likely that there would have been no clarifications or corrections of any kind.
And, unhappily, when this is part of journalistic history millions of people will have read Klein’s original column in the magazine. A tiny proportion of that readership will ultimately have learned that a fundamental premise of his argument was based on falsehood.
But the fact that Time (and Klein) felt obliged to respond at all, however grudgingly and still incorrectly, is a direct result of the growing ability of new media to be heard. There’s little to celebrate in this debacle, but we can at least take some satisfaction from that.
Cory Doctorow has a very smart analysis in Information Week about why he doesn’t fear Facebook taking over the world. Quote:
Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).
That’s why I don’t worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go — and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.
I’m an advisor to NewsTrust, a site where people rate news articles and blog postings for accuracy and quality. So I’m happy to report that the site just was awarded a substantial grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
Fabrice Florin and his team have done amazing work to bring the service this far. Now they’ll have the resources to take it even further. Congrats to all…
“Jon Swift” offers Journalism 101, a sarcastic, clever set of rules for journalists. Funny stuff….
Steve Outing offers “An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media” — a chronicle of the demise of his company, the Enthusiast Group, which created sports sites. He gave it his best effort, but in the end, as he explains, he and his colleagues couldn’t sustain a business.
Steve’s venture (I was an early investor) was one of many in the field. Some are working. Many are not; most startups don’t succeed, an entirely normal state of affairs.
Bottom line: Steve et al deserve enormous credit for trying. They learned — we are all learning — lessons as this new kind of media takes shape. Some are the tough lessons indeed, but they are valuable.