Center for Citizen Media

Markos (Daily Kos) has abandoned the expression MSM (“mainstream media”) to call it traditional media. I’ve been doing this for several years now. I guess I should have blogged about it…

Scott Karp reports “The Huffington Post Allows Top Commenters To Become Bloggers.”
I wish he’d asked the obvious question: Will any of these people get paid? As far as I know, Huffington doesn’t pay her bloggers, even the well-known ones.

Apparently the topic didn’t come up. Karp defends Huffingon’s no-pay approach in the comments.

This is a great business model for Huffington.

Let’s hope it’s unsustainable.

Timothy Carr, in “AT&T Gets Caught in its Own Spin Cycle,” notes the telecom company’s increasingly “slippery response” when confronted with evidence of snipping out political content on its webcast concerts. The company’s sleazy behavior is no surprise, but nonetheless telling in context of its push to decide what bits will reach customers’ computers in what order, if ever.

Dangerous.

Free Press, a think tank and lobbying group, posts: “Stamp Out the Rate Hike: What’s at Stake.” This is a fervent call for the public to do what it can to change the terms of a postal rate hike for magazines.

Postage price increases are nothing new, of course. But the latest hike — somewhat unfairly dubbed by Free Press a “Time Warner plan,” when in fact it’s a modified version of what the media giant suggested — gives a big break to companies that have highly automated and mass distribution systems, and forces less efficient publishers to pay relatively much higher fees. Free Press writes:

The Time Warner plan represents another step (albeit a giant step) in the gradual reversal of the Founders’ public service principles of supporting democracy through the postal service. It is the latest, largest move towards abandoning these public service priorities and permitting a system that no longer favors low-advertising, political speech — like In These Times and The American Spectator — over ad-heavy magazines like People and Cosmo. The practical result of this move is not only the decline of a democratic mission, but a rate shock for small and medium size magazines even as big publishers are getting a break.

This may be true to a point. But it’s also true that the efficiencies promised by the mega-publisher will actually make it cheaper for the postal service to deliver those magazines.

Yet if efficiency and cost of delivery were the real issues in postal services, people sending letters to Alaska’s most rural areas — not to mention Montana and western Colorado, among many other places — would pay significantly more than they’d spend to send a letter across town to pay a local bill. Yet the cost of a first-class stamp, while it has risen across the board, doesn’t vary by location or distance.

Why should the Postal Service be exempt from rational economics when it comes to first-class mail? Because, we’ve decided as a nation, the costs of some kinds of communications should be shared on a national basis, especially when one entity had a monopoly over service.

Our federal mail system led to the rise of newspapers, among other publications, which were in the early days universally delivered by mail. As I noted in “We the Media,” Bruce Bimber called the completion of a superb national post system a “Manhattan project for communications,” an apt comparison given the resources it took to do this. There is no question that the Post Office was a primary and essential contributor to public discourse.

But conditions have changed in all kinds of ways. The package-delivery services (including the Postal Service) charge different amounts to send things to different regions. And in the age of the Internet, when launching a new publication takes almost no money at all, when distance is irrelevant to the producer and consumer alike, why are we so insistent on holding onto an old pricing system?

If fairness and efficiency are the real tests, Congress should bite the bullet and let postal rates reflect actual costs for all kinds of deliveries. And it should end the Postal Service’s monopoly grip over first-class mail.

Until it does, the magazine price hike looks a bit hypocritical.

AP: YouTube Seeks to Depose Jon Stewart. YouTube wants to question Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as part of its defense against claims the online video-sharing site illegally shows snippets of sports and entertainment videos.

YouTube (Google) should post the depositions — with the permission of Stewart and Colbert — on YouTube. That would make an interesting point.

This is a WordPress blog, but no one who’s looking into starting or upgrading their blogging platform should ignore the latest from SixApart. Based on its description and some reviews, Movable Type 4.0 boasts an astounding number of new features, plus a serious ease-of-use upgrade.

I’m going to give it a try over at my personal site, and will report back.

Wired News, in “See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign,” cites an intriguing new software tool called Wikipedia Scanner:

the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Want to help? Wired suggests you download try out the software and then report what you find. (There are already some fascinating items posted…)

Jay Rosen: Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press. Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain.

My own impression is that Jay is a little too hard here on the Washington press corps, and in particular on the (yes, relatively few) members who have not fallen prey to insider-ness.

Fascinating read otherwise…

(Note: Jay and I are on each others’ advisory boards; and we’re working on an upcoming project together.)

Salon’s Farhad Manjoo, asks, “Is network neutrality a fake issue?” No, he says, at least for people in the U.K. who want to watch BBC videos online:

As several British papers reported over the weekend, large ISPs have threatened to shut down people’s access to the BBC’s online videos — unless, of course, the BBC pays the ISPs a fee.

The ISPs advertise unlimited access, and brag about their networks’ ability to serve video. Then, confronted with people who actually believe them, they attempt to renege or, as here, extort the creator of the videos.

Nothing to worry about here, then, is there? You bet there is.

Thirty-two years ago, Don Bolles, a reporter with the Arizona Republic, was mortally wounded in Phoenix when a bomb destroyed his car. His murder sparked the Arizona Project, an unprecedented gathering of investigative journalists from around America who traveled to Arizona to investigate the corruption that, everyone understood, had led to Bolles’ killing.

The project had its flaws. Critics called the entire idea was a mistake. But the “Desert Rats” — the reporters and editors who did the work — and the news organizations that supported and published the long series did, in the end, have an impact both on Arizona’s power structure and the investigative-journalism field.

Above all, they tried to send a message to those who would silence journalists: It won’t work.

This month, Chauncey Bailey, editor of the Oakland Post, a small African-American paper, was gunned down on the street. He was investigating a neighborhood business, Your Black Muslim Bakery. An employee was arrested and, according to the police, confessed to the murder (the man has denied it).

Bailey wasn’t the first American journalist killed on the job since Bolles’ death. We have it relatively “easy” here, however; journalists around the world are frequently killed in wars and in efforts to silence their vital voices.

Bailey’s murder was an especially brazen and cowardly act, a demonstration of sheer contempt for justice and honor. Yet from his media colleagues there was, in these days when traditional journalism is under another kind of gun, little response except well-intended hand-wringing.

The Arizona Project was, clearly, one of a kind. But the financial pressures on media organizations mean that even if people wanted to do another Arizona Project they probably couldn’t, at least not the way they did in the 1970s. As traditional media organizations whack away at their staffs and play to Wall Street’s unceasing demands, many are all but abandoning serious investigative work, too.

Yes, we have some replacements for what’s being lost, from superb newer organizations like the Center for Public Integrity and even in the work of a few NGOs that are doing great reporting if only partially-baked journalism (more on that soon). Crowdsourcing also can and will be a valuable investigative technique, no doubt.

The crumbling of traditional media’s business model may well be unstoppable. And there’s no question that we’re seeing superb kinds of new journalism emerge from the turmoil.

But we will lose something in this period of evolutionary messiness. And we must find a way to replace it. The alternative is to give new freedoms to the malignant forces of power and corruption that a free press is, in part, designed to hold to account.

(Photo thumbnail from Oakland Tribune via the San Francisco Chronicle.)