I’m among the speakers this Thursday evening in a conversation is about “evolution and growing influence” of social news sites. Others on the program include Karen Brophy, Yahoo News; Amy Dalton, Topix.com; Steve Huffman, Reddit.com; and Jay Adelson, Digg.com.
It’s open to the public (no cost) at the Yahoo mother ship in Sunnyvale, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Sign up here.
Jon Garfunkel has done prodigious homework on how a variety of online video posters used (and abused) the attribution principle in “Internet Slash-Ups: Even the pros rip off C-SPAN.
Everyone should point to the Doc Searls Weblog in its new location, to give it the link-love it needs to rise in the search engines.
Jonathan Weber at New West Network asks, “Michael Moore, Why Are You Stealing Our Content?” Pretty shabby…
UPDATED
Please read “Annals of Reporting” from today’s Talking Points Memo, in which Josh Marshall describes what looks like a classic example of journalistic malpractice.
Here’s the gist. Michael Skube, a former newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize winner who’s now a journalism professor, wrote an opinion piece for the LA Times in which he flays bloggers for alleged violations of journalistic principles. In this case, Skube writes, bloggers show little willingness to do serious reporting: devoting “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance” to the topic.
But the piece cites Marshall, whose work is among the best journalism — by any standard — that you can find on the Web in any form, in a passing reference, as if he’s one of the offenders.
Marshall takes this with careful calm, but then he reveals a stunning fact about Skube’s “reporting” style. An editor inserted the mention of Marshall, and Skube — who admitted to Marshall that he hasn’t “spent any time on your site” — let that run in the op-ed column. Marshall writes:
Actually, if you look at what he says, it seems Skube’s editor at the Times oped page didn’t think he had enough specific examples in his article decrying our culture of free-wheeling assertion bereft of factual backing. Or perhaps any examples. So the editor came up with a few blogs to mention and Skube signed off. And Skube was happy to sign off on the addition even though he didn’t know anything about them.
More amazing facts: Paul Jones, who teaches journalism and information science at the University of North Carolina (and writes an excellent blog), points me to this 2005 posting by Ed Cone, who cited an earlier Skube anti-blog rant and then asked Skube some questions:
Given his statement that blogs don’t do real journalism, I asked him what he thought about Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. He remembered Marshall as a magazine writer, but was unfamiliar with his blog, or its new investigative-reporting plan.
I asked him to compare the original reporting model promised by Pajamas Media with the commentary-oriented approach of the Huffington Post. He told me he didn’t know either site.
So, apparently Skube — a journalism professor who has a loathing of blogs — was pointed to TPM almost two years ago, but never bothered to check it out.
Marshall writes, with fairness:
I grant you that the blogosphere needs better bloggers. But, as usual, the need for better critics seems even more acute.
UPDATE: As noted in comments, Jay Rosen implores Skube to retire before he embarrasses himself any further. Ed Cone has an arch comment, too.
The remaining big question in this episode: What will the LA Times and Skube himself do about this mini-travesty? At the very least, a major correction is in order. More appropriate would be an outright apology.
City University in London is offering a full-time “Sky News – City University Studentship in Citizen Media / User-Generated Content”
to explore concepts around citizen journalism in the mainstream news media, using a case study approach and participant observation. For the first year of their PhD the appointee will work closely with Sky News on an innovative project to recruit several hundred “citizen journalists” to report on the next UK general election campaign. The project aims to allow contributors to do more than simply give their opinion; instead they will be expected to write stories, take pictures and possibly record video.
A great opportunity for the right person…
Note to media organizations in the U.S.: There are undoubtedly universities (I can think of at least a couple, cough cough) that would welcome such a project at the masters-degree level.
The Knight News Challenge, in which winners get grants ranging from tiny to huge, is in its second year. Here’s the Knight Foundation’s pitch:
It’s time to enter this year’s Knight News Challenge, which awards big money for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.
The contest is run by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Last year’s winners won awards ranging from $15K to $5 million.
Winning projects included:
* Open-source software that will let citizens find public information about their neighborhoods.
* Young journalists covering the 2008 presidential election on cell phones, for cell phones.
* Online games to inform and engage players about key issues confronting New York City.
* Digital newscasts for Philadelphia’s immigrant community distributed through a new citywide wireless platform.
Anyone worldwide can apply at http://www.newschallenge.org.
This is for real. If you have a great idea, give it a shot.
(Note: Knight sponsored a project here last year, and the News Challenge winners this time included Placeblogger and the Citizen Media Law Project, which I’m advising.)
Radar: Inside Cryptome, the website the CIA doesn’t want you to see. Young is a mad scientist of secrecy, working with little more than monomaniacal focus and an Internet connection to turn the tables on the spooks and expose what he regards as a worldwide criminal network of intelligence operatives. And the spies don’t like it. After he posted the MI6 list in 1999, the British government reportedly asked his Internet service provider at the time to shut the site down. The company refused, but in May of this year, his hosting service suddenly, without explanation, announced that it would no longer have anything to do with the site. (Young promptly relocated to another service.) He says he has received three visits to his home from the FBI, including one from a pair of agents with the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Young’s enemies have tried to shut the site down with denial-of-service attacks. Officials at the National Security Agency read his site with interest, and everyone wants to know where he gets his information.
Here’s the Cryptome site.
UPDATED
NY Times: How Missed Signs Contributed to a Mortgage Meltdown. (T)he cast of characters who missed signals like the rise of delinquencies and foreclosures is becoming easier to identify. They include investment banks happy to sell risky but lucrative mortgage debt to hedge funds hungry for high interest payments, bond rating agencies willing to hope for the best in the housing market and provide sterling credit appraisals to debt issuers, and subprime mortgage brokers addicted to high sales volumes.
The Times fails to add one of the most culpable institutions of all: the press.
Newspapers and broadcasters were raking in billions in advertising from the real estate and banking industries as this bubble inflated. I do not believe this is a coincidence. (Update: I also don’t believe it was deliberate malfeasance; but you just don’t see lots of tough coverage in media of the people and companies paying the bills.)
Oh, sure, there were extremely infrequent stories containing warnings in a few publications — and occasional quotes from skeptics in the prices-just-keep-rising stories that overwhelmingly dominated the coverage. But the reality is that journalists mostly didn’t have a clue, or didn’t want to have a clue. I don’t know which is worse.
Some bloggers did shout warnings. They were ignored, or worse, insulted by wishful thinkers and (I suspect) people who stood to gain from the continuing bubble.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal put a story on Page One, entitled, “One Family’s Journey Into a Subprime Trap.” It chronicled the crazy financial stretch a Fullerton, California, family made in “buying” a house with two loans, one for 80 percent of the price and the other for the rest. The loans were interest-only, and now the real bills are coming due. The Journal writes:
The Monteses are caught in a trap — one that hundreds of thousands of people could face as the housing market totters and the easy credit of recent years dries up. They in effect bet that the boom in housing prices would continue. It was more important to hop onto the escalator than to wait until they could afford to make the leap according to traditional measures.
The Journal’s sympathy for this family seems misplaced, in part because these folks were reckless. They had to know they were taking an enormous risk — though I suppose if they were reading the local newspapers and watching TV perhaps they thought the boom had years and years to run. If they relied on the press to tell the truth, in the kind of incessant drumbeat that it needed telling, they were misguided.
Where were the stories we should have been seeing — the warnings that people like the Monteses were running headlong toward a financial cliff? What happened to the coverage of a housing market that fewer and fewer people could afford to enter except with no-interest or no-down-payment loans, where home prices were so far out of sync with the economy that there was no precedent for such imbalance?
Where were the stories pointing out that the secondary (and far beyond) mortgage markets were salting hugely risky debt all through the American economy? You think your bank or pension fund doesn’t have some of this garbage somewhere in its books? Think again.
The media also bungled by not fingering the makers of this bubble apart from foolish “buyers” who proved to be such suckers. This boom was fueled by people who knew it couldn’t last: brokers, bankers and, above all, Wall Street’s ever-clever wizards who risk other people’s money for gigantic fees.
This is another journalistic scandal. It’s not quite on the order of the bended-knee, pre-war coverage — stenography of government officials’ lies and deceptoins — that helped steer America into the Iraq war, but only because it’s not killing people in large numbers.
It’s a massive enough scandal, though. There’s plenty of pain left in this deflation, possibly including an outright tanking of the economy.
You’d never know if from today’s newspapers. They’re full of stories about how the Federal Reserve is stepping up to keep things on an even keel. What it’s actually doing is propping up the Wall Street con artists who helped fuel this thing.
The journalism craft should take a long, hard look at what it’s failed to do, yet again, in the housing bubble. It has failed to warn — as loudly and incessanty as it did in promoting the housing bubble — that a financial crunch was on the way.
There’s plenty of blame to go around in this mess. The finger-pointing has barely begun. But when it gets going for real, I hope that journalists who do some of that pointing will at least look in a mirror.
John Dvorak: Google Pulls Plug, Everyone Misses Point. The scary part is that we are not talking about some flaky, small underfunded company. We’re talking about Google, a behemoth. This tells me that if Google can throw in the towel and abandon one of its online-related services, then anyone can do it—and they will. And then they’ll all point to Google. “Well, if Google can do it after it made promises, then we can do it.” It can happen anywhere. You have all your family photos online? Good luck with that. Your blogging software and blog are all online? Have a nice day. Your business is completely reliant on online systems? How does your insurance policy look?
The case here is about customers’ ability to use a service they purchased. Google is reneging on its promise. But the bigger issue is in the latter part of this quote — whether the photos, text, videos, financial information and other things you put online are yours, or whether they end up belonging, in practice if not principle, to the company you use to store and/or display them.
For citizen media creators contributing their work to a variety of sites, this is not a trivial issue. The portability of data is one of the absolutely crucial problems in a world of online-everything.
You cannot absolutely depend on online vendors to protect your information, despite their best intentions (and most of them have very good intentions). If you can’t download your data to your own computer, in a form that lets you use it elsewhere with not too much hassle, then you should be clear: It’s not really your data after all.
Should there be a law about this? I suspect, in the end, we may need one.