Center for Citizen Media

There’s a debate under way in the newspaper/journalism corner of the blogosphere and Twittersphere, spurred by an op-ed commentary in the New York Times earlier this week. The piece, by Yale’s chief investment officer, David Swensen, and his colleague Michael Schmidt, a Yale financial analyst, starts with a questionable idea — that newspapers should be endowed as nonprofits in order to save them — and goes south from there. The column begins:

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. American newspapers shoulder the burden of considerable indebtedness with little cash on hand, as their profit margins have diminished or disappeared. Readers turn increasingly to the Internet for information — even though the Internet has the potential to be, in the words of the chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, “a cesspool” of false information. If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved.

There’s so much wrong with this essay that one scarcely knows where to start. In one critique, Alison Fine grasps a key reason the proposal lacks weight: Its “fundamental premise that only newspapers can hold government accountable” is absurd on its face. Continue reading →

Michael Goldfarb, a web editor for the right-wing Weekly Standard, was a blogger on the McCain campaign last fall. In a Q & A with CJR, he says, among other things, that he was told his role would be to “attack the press” in the blog:

And that struck me as a really bad idea, but when a presidential campaign calls up and offers you a job you take it.

Really? There’s no boundary one should fail to cross when offered a presidential-campaign job? Not in Goldfarb’s world, apparently.

At least readers of this person’s writing now have a solid sense of his ethical standards.

I’ll be in New York on Feb. 10 to speak at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. My topic is considering ways to expand and extend the ecosystem around books:

We know now that many books, especially timely non-fiction, can become major elements of intellectual ecosystems—including blogs, websites, magazine excerpts, speaking gigs, consulting and more. In the future those various activities could become part of a business ecosystem as well, where all work to the benefit of each other in more direct financial ways. This suggests collaboration on the part of everyone in the chain – author/speaker, publisher, book agent, speaking agency, et al – and sharing the wealth from the hopefully greater total value that’s likely to be created.

Good news: EveryBlock, the terrific local data site started by Adrian Holovaty, is launching a partnership with the New York Times. More here.

This is part of the future for media entrepreneurs: partnering with established companies to fill in gaps and take advantage of existing clout. Good for both of them.

Here’s a piece I wrote for Talking Points Memo on a subject I’ve covered here before. It begins:

Our government’s current operating principle seems to be bailing out people who were culpable in the financial meltdown. If so, journalists are surely entitled to billions of dollars.

Why? Journalists were grossly deficient when it came to covering the reckless behavior, sleaze and willful ignorance of fundamental economics, much of which was reasonably obvious to anyone who was paying attention, that inflated the housing and credit bubbles of the past decade. Their frequent cheerleading for bad practices — and near-total failure to warn us, repeatedly and relentlessly, of what was building — made a bad situation worse.

Washington Post: New Obama Orders on Transparency, FOIA Requests. In a move that pleased good government groups and some journalists, President Obama issued new orders today designed to improve the federal government’s openness and transparency. The first memo instructs all agencies and departments to “adopt a presumption in favor” of Freedom of Information Act requests, while the second memo orders the director of the Office of Management and Budget to issue recommendations on making the federal government more transparent.

This is indeed good news. The Bush administration’s fanatical devotion to secrecy was at least as much about keeping the public from finding out scandalous behavior as protecting information that, if disclosed, might endanger national security.

We all need to hold Obama’s feet to the fire on this. His administration will inevitably fall, at least on occasion, into what afflicts all governments: a wish to keep embarrassing (or worse) information from the public.

As I noted in an item that was part of a series for the Knight Citizen News Network a while back, “A key point about the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and various state “open records” laws: They are not designed solely for journalists, although that is the popular mythology, sometimes encouraged by professional journalists. They are for everyone, not any special profession or group of people.”

Now we’ll have a better chance to use them well.

From the Los Angeles Times: Rosa Brooks’ Dec. 11 column described Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich as “newly indicted.” He has only been charged in a federal corruption case.

Huh?

Gene Koo: Obama’s non-reductive rhetoric. The technology to bypass top-down media is one cornerstone of Obama’s success as a communicator. His nonreductive rhetoric is another.

Jason Kottke notes the new robots.txt file at whitehouse.gov — down to a single “disallow” from more than 2,400 yesterday.

This is the kind of thing that makes me crazy. The Washington Post runs an interesting story — Obama’s $100,000-Plus Donors Were Able to Give to Several Entities — about “nearly 100” wealthy families who’ve been giving big bucks to Obama. The story is based on data the paper crunched itself.

But the article names just a few of the donors. We’re free to speculate about the rest, but why should we have to? Why not post all of the names, and amounts so we can see who else is on the list and what they gave? Better yet, why not put the database online so other folks can crunch the numbers to see if they get other interesting results?

The Post gets the Internet better than some newspapers, but obviously it still has a lot to learn.