Center for Citizen Media

Here are the 2007 Online Journalism Awards Finalists.

Boston Phoenix: House pest. The biggest political story in Massachusetts right now is the state’s ongoing dalliance with casino gambling — but the biggest scoops haven’t been coming from the Globe or the Herald. Their source, instead, has been Yarmouth resident Peter Kenney, a/k/a the “Great Gadfly,” a sexagenarian carpenter and public-access-cable star who writes for CapeCodToday.com.

This should prompt some soul-searching at the big newspapers…

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released a survey, “The Latest News Headlines—Your Vote Counts,” and asks:

If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people? If a new crop of user-news sites—and measures of user activity on mainstream news sites—are any indication, the news agenda will be more diverse, more transitory, and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources, according to a new study.

With respect (and I have a lot of respect for PEJ), this feels like the wrong question — and it reaches a debatable answer — although the survey has value.

We are not heading to a world with no editors. A portion of the editorial role, at least the part of the editorial role that involves picking stories, is moving to community-driven sites. Digg, Reddit and others in the PEJ survey are crude approximations, however, of what is coming.

Voting is about popularity, and that proves nothinglittle. Mix in reputation — an enormously complex problem — and you have something worthwhile. I’ll have more on this in a longer piece soon.

UPDATED

Observe “Trashing Petraeus,” an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal. It weeps for the loss of civility in political discourse, pointing to a MoveOn.org advertisement in yesterday’s New York Times and congressional Democrats’ silence about it as evidence that “the ability of the U.S. political system to function will be impaired in a way no one would wish for.”

One element of the ad is juvenile at best — turning General Petraeus into “General Betray Us” — a sure way to demean one’s own message. (I suspect the general, a mature and smart man, shook his head at the foolishness of the line and, um, moved on.) But the ad’s political advocacy seems otherwise straightforward.

The MoveOn ad is, however, downright low-key next to the hard-edged, hard-right political spewings from the Journal editorial page over the past several decades. No partisan organization — and the Journal editorial page surely qualifies as one based on its record — has done more to demean political civility in this nation.

I read the Journal and its editorial page every day that it’s published. Until Rupert Murdoch wrecks it, which I consider a near-certainty, I’ll keep reading it — because the news columns are some of the finest journalism in the world and the editorial page, however reprehensible at times, forcefully reflects the authoritarian (except when it comes to corporate misdeeds) and wealth-knows-best agenda of some of our nation’s most powerful people.

But the pretense of shock, shock at the tactics that they — and their friends in the conservative propaganda machine — have employed so systematically over the years transcends hypocrisy. Spare us.

UPDATE: Dan Kennedy looks more broadly at how conservative media including bloggers (people who apparently have not read history too carefully) are absurdly flogging MoveOn with a “McCarthyism” label. And in the comments on his piece you’ll find a pointer that suggests the right-wing Town Hall site actually originated the “Betray Us” meme, though aimed at another Republican; apparently, it’s only a terrible thing to say when a left-leaning organization does it.

Buried in this New York Times story is the following incredible finding from a new poll:

Six in 10 Americans said in the poll that administration officials deliberately misled the public in making a case for the war; 33 percent of all Americans, including 40 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats, say Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

The incredible stuff is not the first part of the sentence — the facts are utterly clear that the Bush administration misled the public as it prepared the nation for a war.

No, the astonishing result is that so many Americans believe Saddam was part of the plot. This has been proved utterly untrue, and even Bush — who did as much as he could to imply otherwise before the war — has admitted as much.

The continuing scandal is that media organizations are doing so little to correct the record. Because it is not enough to run an occasional story debunking the lie.

If I ran a newspaper I would make it a mission to educate people about the truth in these kinds of situations. If the job of the press is not to make as many people as possible understand the truth about big issues such as this, then what is?

Infoworld’s “Cringely” observes, regarding the nototious Quechup:

When you sign up for the site it prompts you to share your address book so you can find out which of your 10,000 close personal friends is also trolling for dates on Quechup. But instead of presenting you with a list of friends, Quechup sends an invite from you to everyone in your book — making you look like a nasty purveyor of pork.

I’ve received several dozen of these spams, and have let the people who didn’t realize they were sending them know that they need to rethink their choices of social networks. Quechup is a great example of how to ruin social media.

I wouldn’t go near an iPhone, but I might well buy an iPod touch. Apple isn’t getting nearly enough credit from journalists for this product.

News-folk: You should be aiming at least some of what you produce at the screen on this WiFi enabled audio/video/Web machine. This is breakthrough territory, way beyond what the iPhone even suggests.

Syracuse.com: SU student questions VA security actions. A Syracuse University graduate student taking photographs outside the VA Medical Center says she was questioned and ordered to delete several images by hospital security officers Thursday afternoon. Mariam Jukaku, 24, of Michigan, said the officers also photocopied her university ID and driver’s license and asked if she was a U.S. citizen. She wonders if her appearance played a part in how the incident was handled.

Let’s be clear: The security officers had no authority to order this woman to do anything of the kind. And if this incident occurred as described (there’s no reason to doubt it), it’s entirely probable that appearances were part of the reason.
These kinds of paranoid acts by officials do nothing to increase security — nothing. They only provide a demontration of what others have called “security theater” — the pretense of protection that does more harm than good.

If you’re trying to reach me via my citmedia.org email address, we are having major problems. I don’t have an ETA for when email will be working again, so please be patient.

UPDATED

I was among the skeptics about the iPhone, and advised people to wait for version 2.0 — for a phone that was much better than this one and not tied to AT&T as the sole network.

So I’m wondering why Apple’s huge price cut yesterday is such a surprise. There were reports that sales had plummeted after the early hype-driven mania, which surprises me not at all. But the people who bought the iPhones earlier this summer should be feeling like suckers, because they have been taken in by a classic example of marketing manipulation.

UPDATE: Apple is making a small concession. It’s offering “every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store.”  In other words, early adopters have to buy something new from Apple to get this credit — there’s no rebate on the iPhone itself; suckers squared.

I hope Apple is planning a 2.0 version that fixes the thing. My guess is we’ll see something fairly soon that works with the higher-speed network AT&T has running in some cities, but even that’s not enough to make me a customer. Not even close.

Some hackers say they’ve freed the iPhone from its AT&T dependency, but I’m waiting to see what countermeasures Apple and the telecom company take to “fix” this hack. We’ll know, once it becomes more common, just how hard-wired the pairing is going to be.

Meanwhile, as noted a few days ago, I’ve been testing the Nokia E90 Communicator, which is about twice the size of the iPhone and about 10 times more useful for what I do.

One addition to my mini-review: I also discovered it makes a nifty portable video player. I ripped a DVD of several early Heroes episodes (yes, I’m now officially hooked) to the device and watched them on a plane. The audio and video were excellent.

I still carry an iPod Nano for music, but Nokia doesn’t have to do a lot more to make the E90 as close to ideal as anything is likely to be for the next year or so. The iPhone isn’t in the same league, in my view.