Center for Citizen Media

Jeff Jarvis, who runs the new media program at City University of New York, reports the great news of new support for journalistic entrepreneurialism & innovation:

a $100,000, two-year grant from the McCormick Tribune Foundation to provide seed funding to news start-ups developed by students in my course in entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.

For a highly traditional foundation like McCormick Tribune to jump in is a terrific development.

It’s not the only thing of its kind out there, which is even more important. Foundations and educational institutions are recognizing the value of this kind of instruction and putting programs into place.

Journalism education is, by and large, way behind the curve. But the range of activity is expanding. That’s extremely good news.

On Larry King’s program, Dan Rather insisted again that the 60 Minutes story about George W. Bush’s National Guard “service” — based in part on the documents that CBS failed to prove authentic – was fair and accurate. Of the panel CBS selected to investigate the debacle, he said:

(A)mong the things they concluded after months of investigation and spending millions of dollars, they could not determine that the documents were fraudulent. Important point, that we don’t know whether the documents were fraudulent or not.

Meanwhile, over at Huffington Post, Rather’s producer, Mary Mapes, writes:

We reported that since these documents were copies, not originals, they could not be fully authenticated, at least not in the legal sense. They could not be subjected to tests to determine the age of the paper or the ink. We did get corroboration on the content and support from a couple of longtime document analysts saying they saw nothing indicating that the memos were not real.

Good grief. The journalistic standard, not just when making a major claim against a sitting president in the middle of a campaign but for all reports that can damage people’s reputations, is not whether the other side can prove the documents are fake. It’s whether the journalist can persuasively show that they are authentic. CBS failed, miserably, in its duty.

Look. Bush ducked out on some of his National Guard duties, and got preferential treatment to join the Guard instead of facing actual combat. The verified reporting by CBS and other news organizations leaves no serious doubt on those issues.

But in the 60 Minutes story Mapes and Rather, who had done some great journalism in their careers, ducked out on their responsibility to the craft — and to their audience. Their continuing defense of their malpractice is more depressing than anything else.

By the way, the blog triumphalism that emerged after “Rathergate” was misguided, too. The traditional media (and at least one PR firm) played significant roles in this event. See Michael Cornfield’s analysis; as well as commentary from Jon Garfunkel and Seth Finkelstein.) Bloggers didn’t debunk anything, not persuasively. What they did do was to raise crucial questions that, in the end CBS could not answer sufficiently to justify its reporting.

In the coverage of the housing bubble deflation, journalists continue to use an expression that defies reality. From today’s Bloomberg story:

As many as half of the 450,000 subprime borrowers whose mortgage payments increase in the next three months may lose their homes because they can’t sell, refinance or qualify for help from the U.S. government.

No one can take joy at the family turmoil that is about to become real after these years of marketplace fantasy. But it’s a huge stretch to make a case that most of these borrowers — many of whom put no money down, or signed up for loans on which they paid only the interest for several years, or used what equity they did have as a piggy bank to spend on other things — own the property at all. Legally, yes. In reality? No.

Why aren’t the news organizations focusing at least some of their fire on that part of the scandal? And where were the stories telling this truth while the bubble was in its final inflationary burst?

Calling it home ownership when someone has zero equity (or less) is absurd. Some of these people are not victims in the slightest, except of their own greed or foolishness, or both.

AP: Dan Rather files $70M suit against CBS. Dan Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS and his former bosses Wednesday, claiming they made him a “scapegoat” for a discredited story about President Bush’s military service during the Vietnam War.

When, oh when, will journalists stop falling for the bogus PR stunts lawyers and their clients play when filing lawsuits? Apparently, never.

You can file a lawsuit demanding any amount of money. The amount in the claim is totally meaningless. It’s solely about public relations and/or, if the person being sued is unschooled about the system, putting fear into the defendant.

Yet journalists fall for this every time. Argghhh….

Harvard Crimson: Coop Discourages Notetaking in Bookstore:

Coop President Jerry P. Murphy ’73 said that while there is no Coop policy against individual students copying down book information, “we discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes.” The apparent new policy could be a response to efforts by Crimsonreading.org—an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers—from writing down the ISBN identification numbers for books at the Coop and then using that information for their Web site. Murphy said the Coop considers that information the Coop’s intellectual property. Crimson Reading disagrees. “We don’t think the Coop owns copyright on this information that should be available to students,” said Tom D. Hadfield ’08, a co-creator of the site.

So here’s the counter-move, coming to the Coop soon: snapping a quick photo of the price with a mobile phone camera, or better yet, scanning the bar code.

J-Lab:

TechPresident.com, a data-rich, nonpartisan group blog that covers real-time, online activity of the 2008 presidential candidates – and chronicles online content from voters who will elect them, is this year’s $10,000 Grand Prize winner in the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

Bafflingly, the winning entries aren’t hyperlinked in the press release. You’ll find them here.

In “A Letter to Readers About TimesSelect, the paper writes:

Effective Sept. 19, we are ending TimesSelect. All of our online readers will now be able to read Times columnists, access our archives back to 1987 and enjoy many other TimesSelect features that have been added over the last two years – free.

Glad to see that the Times is putting its great cast of columnists more firmly back into the public conversation than they’d been behind the pay-wall. That’s excellent news for the writers and the readers.

The second part of this shift may actually be more important. The Times is opening its archives, or at least the past 20 years worth.

Presumably, each article will have a perma-link. If so, watch what happens. The Times’ stories — many of which are definitive moments of journalism — will become the de facto primary sources for people around the Web, and around the world. On topic after topic, the Times story (or stories) will move near or to the top of the search engine rankings. They will become more valuable for keyword and other advertising once people click through to the actual stories.

The Times clearly gets this. From the letter:

Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism. We encourage everyone to read our news and opinion – as well as share it, link to it and comment on it.

About two and a half years ago, I joined Doc Searls and others in calling on newspapers to open their archives, for exactly these reasons. A senior online executive at the Times subsequently assured me that I was delusional if I thought the paper would ever do this, given the revenues it was attracting selling archived articles one at a time.

We won’t know for some time whether this experiment proves financially valuable beyond the utterly essential value the Times is offering to people who care about journalism. Needless to say, I believe it will.

I hope other newspapers will follow the Times’ lead, and do it quickly.

(Disclosure: I own a small amount of NY Times Co. stock. It is currently worth less than I paid for it.) 

I have an op-ed piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle urging the nation’s community foundations — which are holding a conference this week in San Francisco — to play a growing role in keeping local journalism vibrant. It starts:

As America wakes up to the crumbling of basic infrastructure, with Minnesota’s bridge collapse the most recent example, a more subtle but also alarming breakdown is hitting our cities and towns. In community after community, newspapers are shedding editorial staff at a rate that spells trouble for a well-informed citizenry, a foundation of a free society.

Unlike the job of building and maintaining roads and bridges, however, ensuring a vibrant press is a questionable role for government, when a key role of journalism is to question power and hold it to account. Nor, as we are seeing, can it be the sole responsibility of the private sector, not when an eroding business model for community journalism leads private owners to favor the bottom line above all other values.

As the nation’s community foundations gather in San Francisco for their annual meeting this week, I’d like to suggest that they put the survival of quality local journalism squarely on their own agendas. They, perhaps more than any other entities, could play a vital role in ensuring that communities emerge from an inevitably messy media transition with the kind of local information sources we all need.

Jeff Jarvis and CUNY are hosting and organizing it.

I’d be attending if not for an earlier scheduled trip to Russia that ends the day before and an event the next day at UC Berkeley, where we’ll be having a conversation with Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales and OhmyNews’ Oh Yeon Ho.

Sorry to miss this one…

Chris Knight, who’s been unfairly treated by media giant Viacom, now says: YouTube has restored my clip.

Good.