Center for Citizen Media

Ethan Zuckerman: Is ad-supported journalism viable in a pay-for-performance age? (I)t’s possible that the way we’ve built media in the United States can’t survive a transition to a more rational market.

Glenn Greenwald (Salon): Establishment Washington unifies against prosecutions. As confirmed accounts emerged years ago of chronic presidential lawbreaking, warrantless eavesdropping, systematic torture, rendition, “black site” prisons, corruption in every realm, and all sorts of other dark crimes, where were journalists and other opinion-making elites? Very few of them with any significant platform can point to anything they did or said to oppose or stop any of it — and they know that. Many of them, even when much of this became conclusively proven, were still explicitly praising Bush officials. Most of them supported the underlying enabling policies (Guantanamo and the permanent state of war in Iraq and “on terror”), and then cheered on laws — the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act — designed to legalize these activities and retroactively immunize the lawbreakers and war criminals from prosecution. So when these media and political elites are defending Bush officials, mitigating their crimes, and arguing that they shouldn’t be held accountable, they’re actually defending themselves. Just as Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller can’t possibly demand investigations for crimes in which they were complicit, media stars can’t possibly condemn acts which they supported or, at the very best, towards which they turned a blissfully blind eye. They can’t indict Bush officials for what they did because to do so would be to indict themselves. Bush officials need to be exonerated, or at least have their crimes forgotten (look to the future and ignore the past, they all chime in unison), so that their own involvement in it will also be cleansed and then forgotten.

This is a harsh indictment, but it’s hard to argue with Greenwald. With rare exceptions, Washington journalists have been complicit in the lawbreaking that characterized the Bush administration. Now, even as they admit that the crimes were crimes, they want everyone to forgive and forget — but mostly forget.

This is another chapter in the breakdown of journalism as one of the few institutions that holds power accountable. In this case, it would mean holding journalism accountable, too. Not going to happen.

StinkyJournalism.org: The Unspoken Peril for “Citizen Journalists” Surprise! You Owe the IRS Some Gift Tax! Is the “donation” of a citizen’s content (video, articles, commentaries, images) to for-profit media outlets that exceeds a fair market value of $12,000 in any single year subject to gift tax? Judging from the IRS guidelines, the answer is “yes.”

This is a surprise, and an unwelcome one.

Before people panic, however, we should keep in mind that — given the typical freelance rates paid by media outlets these days — you’d have to spent a lot of time sending stories to large media organizations before you’d be even potentially liable for gift taxes.

The good news is that it won’t affect in any way the occasional contributor, or even a frequent contributor to nonprofit or low-traffic sites, and it has no bearing whatever on your own work on your own blog, period.

More important, it’ll help get people thinking harder about financial implications in general. The business model that says “You do all the work and we’ll collect all the money” has always been a lousy one, not to mention unfair. Now, if that turns into “You do all the work, we’ll take all the money and you’ll pay taxes on what we don’t pay you,” the citizen journalists will look even harder at this unbalanced state of affairs.

The Citizen Media Law Project has a terrific explainer up today — “Documenting the 2009 Presidential Inauguration” — for people who are planning to be in Washington for the Obama inauguration. It explains:

During the Inauguration, heightened security measures will be in place across Washington, D.C., particularly in the areas where official events are taking place. These security measures, as well as tickets, permits, and credentialing requirements, will affect where you can go, what you can bring with you, and what you can do to document the Inauguration. Your location and what events are taking place there will influence what legal and other limitations you are subject to. The following information will help you understand and comply with security measures and other requirements while documenting the Inauguration.

If you’re going to be there with your camera, etc., this is invaluable information.

Jay Rosen: Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized– connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding.

Lasantha Wickramatunga: And Then They Came for Me. No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces – and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the last few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print institutions have been burned, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories, and now especially the last.

Wickramatunga was the editor of the Sri Lankan Sunday Leader, newspaper that crusaded for honor and against corruption. Please read his final column to remember why journalism remains a vital, and sometimes noble, craft.

NBPC New Media Institute 2009: The National Black Programming Consortium and its National Minority Consortia partners invite you to participate in the 4th Annual New Media Institute (NMI). The NMI is a unique professional development program working to transform producers of color from television producers into media-makers who can work seamlessly between various digital platforms. NBPC, a national, nonprofit media arts organization, has been the leading provider of Black programming on public television and a great resource for training Black media professionals for nearly 30 years. In association with the NMC, The New Media Institute was developed out of a need expressed by the producers we serve. Building upon last year’s theme of social networking and active citizenship, NMI ’09 will explore mobile journalism.

The New York Times has been among the prime examples of media organizations that refuse to call torture what it is: torture. The euphamism that the Times and other traditional (and cowardly) media outlets have been using has typically been “enhanced interrogation techniques” — despite the fact that at least one of those techniques, waterboarding, has been the basis of our own government’s war-crimes cases against others in the past.

Today the Times moves the ball slightly toward the correct goal line. In an online posting about the naming of several key Justice Department officials, reporter Eric Lichtblau writes of “practices bordering on torture.”

This borders on accuracy, and is an improvement. One of these days, the newspaper may actually use the correct word without equivocation.

Howard Rosenberg replied to my posting that criticized his (and a co-author’s) misguided views on government versus corporate censorship (I don’t believe the latter exists). I’ve posted his email in the body of that post, which you can find here.

From the top of the current LA Times homepage:

Could we be reaching a bottom soon in the real estate market?