Center for Citizen Media

Globe and Mail (Toronto): NowPublic nixes takeover bids, lands financing. NowPublic.com, a leading “citizen journalism” site based in Vancouver announced today that it has closed a $10.6-million (U.S.) round of financing from venture capital groups in the U.S. and Canada, after turning down several offers to acquire the company outright

Yes, there have been setbacks in the citizen-journalism sphere recently. But the broader trend is positive, as this announcement demonstrates.

(Disclosure: I’m on NowPublic’s advisory board.)

Press Gazette (UK): MPs outlaw satire in New Zealand. New Zealand’s Parliament has voted itself far-reaching powers to control satire and ridicule of MPs in Parliament, attracting a storm of media and academic criticism. The new standing orders, voted in last month, concern the use of images of Parliamentary debates, and make it a contempt of Parliament for broadcasters or anyone else to use footage of the chamber for “satire, ridicule or denigration”.

This sounds so outlandish that I can’t believe have trouble believing it’s true. We’ll keep an eye on this and let you know.

Doc Searls — blogger’s blogger, journalist, author and deep thinker about how the world is changing and how we can be more effective participants — turns 60 today.

It wasn’t so long ago that 60 reflected a fairly old age, or something verging on that. No longer. It’s a passage — David Weinberger calls Doc an “elder” but definitely not an old man.

For many folks in this swiftly changing world, age 60 is just another year for new ideas and activities. Consider Doc, a friend and colleague whose work has inspired me for years.

At Harvard’s Berkman Center, where we’re both Fellows, he’s working at the moment on Vendor Relationship Management, the idea of making”markets work for both vendors and customers — in ways that don’t require the former to ‘lock in’ the latter.” It’s an enormously important idea, and could lead toward major changes.

I suspect that VRM could not have come from a young person. It’s one of those notions that takes hold slowly and requires experience, not just talent, to ripen.

The age of 60 came up recently in another context. I’m on a task force helping to rethink the John S. Knight Fellowships for journalists at Stanford University. These have been “mid-career” fellowships, but in the modern world the definition of mid-career surely must change. I know some 25-year-olds who’ve already done spectacular things, and some 60-year-olds who are just getting around to inventing new kinds of journalism products and projects. “Sixty isn’t old anymore,” I said in one of our meetings. (Doc is busy enough now, but I’d endorse him for one of these fellowships in a microsecond.)

From here, it looks like Doc Searls is accelerating, not slowing down. A good thing for all of us, but especially this brilliant and genuinely good man.

Happy birthday, Doc.

(Photo from Doc’s Flickr page)

I’ve been using Facebook mostly to get a feel for its possibilities, not as a place to do business or keep all that close track of anything. I logged onto the site today and found four messages from people who either already knew my email address or who could have easily found it. I’ve responded via email, not via Facebook, because I have no idea when I’ll log back into the site.

Meanwhile, there’s a slew of new “friend” invitations and assorted other stuff to look through. I’m overwhelmed by it all, in part because of the foolishly tedious process the site forces you to endure to vet and approve new “friends” — no batch add of people, as LinkedIn smartly allows, and a ridiculous insistence that you explain your connection to the other people before you can accept them as friends.

Moreover, I don’t find it terribly useful except for the bloggish feature in the center of the personalized page. That’s a not-bad summary of people’s activities, but it doesn’t compensate for all the other issues.

I’m inclined to agree with Jason Calacanis, whoi declared Facebook bankruptcy, and with Dave Winer, who never accepted it as a liability in the first place. But the germ of an incredibly useful site remains — if it’s made considerably more open, in the sense of letting people export their data in ways of their own choosing.

If you’re on Facebook and want to contact me, please don’t use the internal messaging system. Go here instead. Thanks.

NY Times: Family Shifts Add to Doubt at Dow Jones. The deliberations of the Bancroft family over whether to sell the publisher of The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation took several bizarre turns yesterday as family members switched sides, sniped at one another and even sought to change the terms of the offer and of their own family trusts.

Talk about dysfunctional families. Whew…

David Lazarus has been, in general, an excellent business columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s taken consumer protection more seriously than just about any journalist in California, and perhaps the nation. Now he’s moving to the Los Angeles Times, where I hope he’ll thrive.

I hope his editors there are as tough-minded as the ones at the Chronicle. In final Chronicle piece, Lazarus appropriately lauds editors who’ve stood behind his pro-consumer writings.

But I have to note two surprising lapses in today’s column, in which Lazarus interviews Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate turned politician, “to look at the state of consumer advocacy in the United States.” The piece points out that consumers, in a time of government abandonment of consumer protection, are largely on their own, and urges more media activism in this space.

Bloggers and other upstart media have taken on much of what’s missing from government and (most) traditional media. Take a look at the merciless consumer reporting at the Consumerist for a stark example. Moreover, people are talking about companies in forums, mail lists and other sites that tend to be unnoticed by Big Media but which serve a terrific purpose.

Nader’s work in the 1960s and 1970s was indeed pathbreaking. But his more recent work helped create the very problems the columnist describes.

How could Lazarus ignore an absolutely essential fact? Namely: Nader’s presidential campaign in 2000 is one of the key reasons that the current administration — which has systematically gutted consumer protection — won power in the first place. Isn’t this relevant?

A small nit: Lazarus notes, coyly, that he’s moving to “another well-known newspaper that’s beefing up its consumer coverage.” Why not just name the LA Times? The failure to spell it out is a vestige of what should be a long-past era when journalists mentioned the competition only under extreme duress. And the Times only competes with the Chronicle online, if at all.

In any event, the Bay Area will miss his work. Luckily, we’ll be able to find it online.

The Silicon Valley company’s general counsel, Mike Dillon, writes that on Monday Sun:

will release our financial information first to the public via our website, RSS feeds and 8-K filing. Then, about 10 minutes later, we will release the information to the traditional private agencies and their paid subscribers.

This is a step forward in corporate transparency — not a gigantic one but nonetheless important. The company is using technology in a smart way, good for investors and regulators alike.

(Via Dave Winer)

The BBC Berkshire’s interactive flood map:

takes the best photos and video sent in by you to berkshire.online@bbc.co.uk, alongside reports from our correspondents around the county and flood warning information from the Environment Agency.

This is a good example of how traditional media organizations — working with their audiences — can use mashup technology to create new kinds of journalism.

BBC: Malaysia cracks down on bloggers. The Malaysian government has warned it could use tough anti-terrorism laws against bloggers who insult Islam or the country’s king.

I remember visiting Malaysia in late 2001, and being assured by people in business and government that the Internet was going to truly remain a free-speech zone (unlike the highly regulated traditional media). I also remember an online journalist telling me that this would last as long as the Net is being seen only by a tiny minority of the citizens.

Am I the only one who said “Oh, please” after seeing Martha Stewart on the cover of this month’s Wired magazine? Well, at least they didn’t put Enron’s Jeff Skilling on the cover.