Center for Citizen Media

NY Times: FCC rebuffed by court on indecency fines. The decision, by a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, was a sharp rebuke for the Federal Communications Commission and for the Bush administration. It was a major victory in a legal battle being waged by the four television networks–Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC–that had filed the case.

It was important for the networks to stand up to the bullying that was turning the FCC into the Federal Censorship Commission. Broadcasters deserve First Amendment protections, and the current regulatory system has been grossly misused to clamp down on speech of various kinds.

Invisible Inkling: 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head.

My favorite line: “Stop whining.”

The Wall Street Journal does a service this weekend with “Deconstructing TripAdvisor,” a long article (unfortunately behind the newspaper’s pay-wall) that helps explain the popularity — and the flaws — of TripAdvisor, which for many people (including me)

has become a first stop for travel planning. Thanks in part to its prominence in Google searches, some 24 million visitors a month check out what other users have to say about where to stay, eat and play around the world. (In contrast, publisher Frommer’s sells 2.5 million guidebooks a year.) With more than 250,000 hotels, its sheer breadth of properties makes it more useful than other hotel Web sites. Its wide range of contributors — there are nearly 10 million reviews and opinions — make it more democratic.

“Democratic” doesn’t always mean that the crowd is perfectly wise, of course. While I find the reviews to be largely congruent with my own experiences, I keep a healthy skepticism about what I read.

The Journal reporter makes some key points, including the necessity to be wary of reviews that are either pure raves or utter slams. The latter can well be written by people who’ve had (maybe) rare bad experiences or by competitors, and the former can come from people affiliated with the property.

It’s a terrific article. It’s also a lesson in the evolving nature of media — and media literacy.

Yochai Benkler, the brilliant thinker about how modern collaborative tools are changing the economy and our lives in general, is coming to Harvard Law School and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with which this center is affiliated (along with UC-Berkeley) and where I’m a research fellow. Benkler’s 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks, is probably the most important volume for understanding these changes.

I’m at Berkman today for the Internet & Society Conference 2007. The title this year is “University: Knowledge Beyond Authority,” and the theme is largely about how “open” — in all kinds of ways — the university (all universities, not just Harvard) should be in a Digital Age.

Openness is a multidirectional question, and includes the way intellectual property law interacts with the university and society as a whole.

Today’s event is public. Yesterday was a smaller gathering of representatives from various constituencies — including academics, nonprofits, the “content” industry and others — to find at least some common ground. Under the rules of the day, I can’t say who said what.

There were indications that some people in the entertainment industry realize how counter-productive their restrictive copyright policies have been in key respects. Scholars are persistently thwarted in their attempts to make what by all accounts should be “fair use” of videos and other materials that “content holder,” as they’re known, lock down so powerfully to thwart infringement.

One suggestion, that universities should participate actively in policing alleged copyright infringement, was not viewed with much favor, it seemed to me, by anyone but the representatives of the entertainment industry.

Mark Glaser, at PBS MediaShift, interviews PlaceBlogger founder Lisa Williams: Placeblog Pioneer Sees Geo-Tagging as Key to Local Aggregation.

Ventura (California) Star: Colleges keep turning out optimistic print journalists despite the newspaper industry crunch. While students focusing on public relations, advertising and broadcasting account for much of the increased journalism enrollment on most campuses, sizeable numbers still want print media careers and are determined to find newspaper jobs despite increasingly bleak employment prospects.

This is strange, to say the least, because the prospects for traditional newspaper jobs are getting slimmer all the time.

I’ve been telling students who wonder about their futures to understand the changes in media, but not to get depressed about them. There’s never been a worse time to jump on the semi-standard career track of the past, where you worked for a succession of papers, each one bigger than the last, and hoped to end up at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post or other major daily. Maybe one of the students I’ve taught this year — all of whom were immensely talented — will go that route.

But I also tell them the bright side: There’s never been a better time to be a journalistic entrepreneur — to invent your own job, to become part of the generation that figures out how produce and, yes, sell the journalism we desperately need as a society and as citizens of a shrinking planet. The young journalists who are striking out on their own today, experimenting with techniques and business models, will invent what’s coming.

Most experiments will fail. That’s not a bug in the system, but a feature. It’s how we get better.

I can assure students of this. If I am in a position to hire someone, all other things equal, I will absolutely favor someone who’s failed at something interesting — and learned from his or her mistakes — over someone who’s taken the seemingly safe route.

A professor at UC-Berkeley, where I’ve been teaching part-time, bemoans “The decline of news” in an op-ed piece in today’s SF Chronicle. Needless to say, I think he’s way, way off the mark, and I’m working on a response that’s a lot more optimistic.

I’m at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, California, seeing a bunch of amazing new geographic tools. I find myself wondering whether certain journalists are present.

I don’t mean reporters who may be covering the conference. No, I’m talking about “database journalists” who use technology to help tell stories better. They should be here because some of the technology being shown here could easily be the basis for some extraordinary community information — if journalists have the common sense to use it.

Mapping and data that can be geo-coded — put into databases that can populate or link to maps — are an enormously powerful tool. It’s mind-boggling to me that more news organizations aren’t taking advantage of the possibilities, or, in most cases, even bothering to learn what’s possible.

I’ll be talking more about this in the next day or so. Stay tuned.

(Note: I’m involved with a Web service that’s being demonstrated here, and O’Reilly Media, the company that’s putting this conference together, also published my book, We the Media.)

It got a bit lost in the overall noise when the Knight Foundation announced the winners of its 21st Century News Challenge, in which the foundation awarded some $12 million in grants for creating new kinds of community journalism, but one of the most intriguing and potentially valuable winners was Rich Gordon at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Rich’s goal is, essentially, to help bring into the journalism universe more people like Adrian Holovaty (also a grantee). Adrian is a terrific programmer with a journalist’s soul.

Rich will use the Knight grant to create:

an academic program blending computer science and journalism, designed to fill a staffing void at many digital news sites. By offering scholarships to Medill’s graduate journalism program to people with education and/or expertise in computer programming, the goal is to turn out students who understand both journalism and technology, connect one to another in ways that build audiences and also enhance and protect the civic functions of journalism in a democratic society.

Now, Northwestern isn’t what you’d call a hotbed of technology superstars. But Medill is a great journalism school — and it’s offering scholarships for qualified applicants.

Rich wants to get this program going in the fall term. That means a short deadline for applying.

If you blog about such things, please link to Rich’s call for applicants on the Medill site. What Adrian has been doing, and what Rich wants to broaden, is essential to the future of journalism.

One of the invaluable resources in the citizen media community has needs financial help. It’s Open Source Radio, and I encourage everyone to donate. Now.