Center for Citizen Media

It’s disappointing to see the new book, “Cult of the Amateur,” getting so much attention from media organizations — but sadly not surprising.

As noted here and elsewhere, the book is rife with falsehoods and misrepresentations, but journalists aren’t bothering to do any homework. As they do so often, they just conduct interviews, giving a megaphone to an author who lacks integrity, and give this travesty even more legs.

I’ve been asked by PBS and BBC if I might appear as a counterpoint in a semi-debate format. Sorry, I won’t help sell such a sleazy book. Regrettably, they do.

The advertisement at the top of a story this morning on TPMmuckraker.com held out the promise of a “Free Apple iPhone.” I had to turn off the audio come-on that launched when I loaded the page, which was annoying enough. But that’s not why I note this ad, or why Joshua Micah Marshall, proprietor of the TPMmuckraker site, and his colleagues should reconsider whether they want to do business with this particular advertiser.

Take a look at David Lazarus’ column in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, “No Such Thing as a Free Laptop.” He was writing about a similar offer at a different website. But the sites’ designs have a great deal in common (including identical “testimonials” and the same “Help Desk” phone numbers). Most of the sites’ terms and conditions are also word-for-word identical, though there are a few differences.

Lazarus writes of these terms:

Clicking a link at iwantmyfreelaptop.com for “program requirements” — not that most people would — reveals enough loopholes and disclaimers to make clear that the free laptop is perhaps anything but.

Among other things, the requirements say participants must:

— Provide their names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

— Agree to receive marketing pitches and other communications from both TheUseful and its partners “via e-mail, telemarketing, direct marketing, mobile marketing and any other method.”

— Comply with all provisions of the agreement, including one that says you have to sign up for no fewer than 10 solicitations from program sponsors and can’t cancel any of them for at least 60 days.

Even then, TheUseful reserves the right to “substitute any gift with another item of similar value, as determined in our sole discretion; or send you the cash equivalent for the gift, as determined in our sole discretion.”

Lazarus’ column quotes the Better Business Bureau of Southeastern Florida’s unhappiness with the site, and a spokesman who says, “Basically, they’re not coming through with their promises.”

TMPmuckraker deserves to succeed. Does it want to succeed with this kind of advertising?

That’s the promise of so-called ‘Campaign Embeds’ From National Journal, NBC:

dedicated video-journalists, each of whom will serve as their own mobile campaign bureaus (reporter, producer, cameraperson and blogger), armed with the latest technology for both video and text. The “Decision 2008” campaign reporters will also provide viewers and readers with behind-the-scenes coverage and unprecedented insider access to news and information about the candidates and their top advisors.

Just how inside the access really will be remains to be seen. Let’s hope it’s not more of the same stuff we usually get.

The The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda has released a fascinating and valuable study of transparency at 25 major journalism organizations with global or otherwise widespread audiences:

A majority of the public believes the media can’t be trusted. Which global news sites are most transparent about their operations? Not necessarily the ones you would think….

The Guardian ranked at the top of the 16 sites surveyed, with the New York Times next. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News ranked last, below Time magazine.

It seems to me that the survey has a flaw, however. Consider that the Economist and Fox News rank relatively low. But because I already know their world views, which they do not disguise (even though Fox News continues to offer its patently false slogan of “fair and balanced”), I put that world view into the lens through which I see their reports.

By having a world view and being biased toward it, they are somewhat transparent in a helpful way. The survey doesn’t take that into account.

The next time the researchers do this study, they should consider adding this variable. The results might change.

The Guardian: Right sermon, wrong preacher. There is an easy response to Tony Blair’s lecture on the failings of the media, and some will seize on it. It is to accuse the prime minister – the master (some will say) of half truths, evasion and spin – of breathtaking hypocrisy and an almost clinical lack of self-awareness. Well, yes. But Mr Blair’s heartfelt homily deserves a more serious response. His words will have struck a sympathetic chord, not simply among people in public life, frustrated at the way their words and deeds are mediated, but among a broad section of readers and viewers as well. Much of what he said was true, and it took some courage to say it, a courage that was doubtless easier to draw on amid the last embers of a political career.

As it happens, I stopped by the Guardian yesterday while its editor, Alan Rusbridger, was working on this editorial (British papers call editorials “leaders.”). More than most responses to Tony Blair’s sharp-edged speech yesterday, it reflects the reality that the prime minister made some good points amid his brazen hypocrisy.

The Blair speech comes on the heels of a gigantic scandal involving his government. As the Guardian and BBC have led the way in reporting (Guardian, BBC coverage), BAE, the British aerospace giant that makes fighter planes, has made huge payments to a Saudi prince — apparently with government approval if not overt complicity. If this journalism is not an example of the finest traditions of the craft, nothing is, and it’s plainly a disaster for Blair and his cronies.

I’d disagree with the Guardian on one point, though — the newspaper’s rather mild response to Blair’s chilling, if carefully worded, pitch for more government control of journalism. Media control is an authoritarian’s favored tool. The police-state tendencies of governments worldwide, which are especially worrisome here in the nation that gave birth to the Magna Carta, don’t need any further assistance.

Jason Calacanis, who calls his new venture Mahalo “human-powered search,” says the company will pay freelance searchers a fee for links the site accepts. He says he hopes for hundreds or thousands of people in this part-time capacity.

This sounds to me like an updated version of the Open Directory Project, but this time with payments for the editors. Not a bad idea.

In his talk at the NMK event, Jason called for wide efforts to rid the Net of the pollution he says threatens to choke off all of the value. He had particular contempt for the search engine “optimization” industry that he believes is one of the worst polluters. (Click on his slide, left, to see a trajectory of decline.)

But, he says, blogs have so far responded fairly well with antibodies. (The “blogs” slide at right has a happier ending.) Naturally, he pitches his new company as an andidote for part of the problem.

There’s no question that the major Internet companies (read Google, Yahoo, Microsoft et al) have not done enough to curb the pollution. But do we really want to toss out the part of this that machines handle so well? I don’t think so.

I spent most of the day at the BBC in London, visiting with people in several departments about the organization’s online work. Then it was over to the Guardian for a brief chat with several folks.

Tomorrow I’ll be at the NMK Forum, a new-media conference, doing a keynote talk on citizen journalism’s present and future.

The center has received new financial support from charitable organizations affiliated with two of America’s great journalism companies. They are:

• The Philip L. Graham Fund, founded in 1963 and named after late Washington Post publisher and president of the Washington Post Company. The funds will go, in part, toward citizen media workshops and lectures, as well as general activities.
• The McClatchy Company Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the newspaper company. (McClatchy bought my former employer Knight Ridder last year, and I’m a shareholder as a result.) The funds are for general activities.

I’m delighted, and honored.

At Poynter.org, Steve Klein discusses deals by niche sports sites YourMTB.com and YourCycling.com, which “have developed an innovative program to provide coverage for cycling races and events that allows competitors and/or spectators to blog, take photograph and shoot video.”
Klein calls this “yet another lost opportunity for mainstream media, which simply lacks the resources to make all its audience happy all the time.”

(Disclosure: I’m an investor in the parent company of these sites.)

Louisville Courier-Journal: Courier-Journal reporter ejected from U of L game. A Courier-Journal sports reporter had his media credential revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during the NCAA baseball super-regional yesterday because of what the NCAA alleged was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events. Gene McArtor, a representative of the NCAA baseball committee, approached C-J staffer Brian Bennett at the University of Louisville’s Jim Patterson Stadium in the bottom of the fifth inning in the U of L-Oklahoma State game. McArtor told him that blogging from an NCAA championship event “is against NCAA policies. We’re revoking the credential and need to ask you to leave the stadium.”

The paper is naturally challenging the NCAA’s right to do this, and should, because the collegiate association is being ridiculous.

But the paper should go much further. For one thing, it should go around the control freaks, and buy a ticket for a reporter and have him/her blog the game from the stands.

Then it should get the readers/fans involved. For example, the paper should ask readers to blog the game themselves, from TV sets or from the stands, or both — and then point to the best reader game-blogs.

This, of course, will infuriate the control freaks. They will try to clamp down even further before they realize that, unless they want to ban all digital devices from their arenas — another futile gesture — they’ll ultimately have to let people tell each other what is happening in something close to real time.

(Whoops; the original headline had the sport wrong…corrected. Thanks, Terry.)