Center for Citizen Media

Time Magazine’s Richard Schickel, riffing off a New York Times story about literary bloggers that ran several weeks ago, goes berserk in “Not everybody’s a critic,” an LA Times op-ed piece that adds to the amazingly uninformed backlash against citizen media:

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Ah, cutting to the chase: Writing critically is an “elite enterprise,” plainly not in the scope of the non-accredited who can only be given permission, apparently, by esteemed publications. Such as Time, a magazine that has gone so far down-market as to be laughable in recent years? Good grief.

Schickel cites famous critics such as George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, as if bloggers are actually comparing themselves with such folks (is Schickel?). These were people who

wrote for intelligent readers who emerged from their reviews grateful to know more than they did when they started to read, grateful for their encounter with a serious and, indeed, superior, mind. We do not — maybe I ought to make that “should not” — read to confirm our own prejudices and stupidity.

Prejudice? There you have it, in spades.

Stupidity? Not quite. Lack of serious reporting is more the issue.

The Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum notes, for example, that the NY Times piece is farthest thing imaginable from blogger triumphalism. In fact, the bloggers aren’t comparing themselves with newspaper reviewers (fewer and fewer of whom are staff employees or, in many cases, even paid beyond getting a free copy of the book). They’re doing something different.

Schickel isn’t wrong about several issues, notably one he raises deep in his screed: the modern debasement of damn near everything he finds culturally significant, and the ascendance of people who merely love books (and movies) into the review-writing heights that he and his chosen brethren have managed to scale. Welcome to Earth, 2007.

Oh, it’s not impossible for a blogger to write a serious review, he says. But before he’ll listen to a word anyone says, he demands credentials. Only the anointed — again, by whom? — are invited, or can be taken seriously.

I’m a fan of Schickel’s movie reviews, even though I don’t agree with many of his conclusions. What seems to bother him most is that he and other well-paid critics are losing their oligopoly on publicly available wisdom. Loving something is not the only credential for being a critic. But it’s a hell of a start.

7iber.com is a new citizen media startup in Jordan. The aim is to create:

an independent web-based citizen-media news outlet from Jordan. 7iber provides original, creative and interesting content, seeking to better inform our audience of untapped Jordanian issues as well as providing local perspectives and first-hand accounts of news, politics, arts and culture. 

The audience, for now, is intended to be “persons of Arab origin living abroad and those interested in alternative coverage of Jordan.” But the ambitions are greater. I’ll be watching this with great interest.

That’s the question being posed on Monday afternoon, May 21, at the Knight Fellowships 2007 Symposium at Stanford University. Recommended.

SF Chronicle: Chronicle to cut 25% of jobs in newsroom “That’s not just trimming fat, that’s an amputation. That’s losing a limb,” said (Tom) Rosenstiel (director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington), who grew up in the Bay Area.

Amputation sounds about right, and it’s a serious blow to local journalism. But in this case the move was plainly going to happen.

When Hearst bought the Chronicle years ago, it pledged to keep all the employees from the old Chronicle. Then it brought the SF Examiner employees along, and had what can only be called a bloated staff.

But the paper did improve — wow, did it improve.

The city always deserved a vastly better paper than it had. It still deserves a better paper, but the positive change has been incredible since the Hearst buyout.

Yet that didn’t translate to subscribers — circulation kept dropping, in part due to deliberate corporate decisions, and advertising didn’t recover after the burst of the tech bubble and the increasing inroads from classified-ad competitors that work better for buyers and sellers. The newspaper was said to be losing $1 million a week a year ago, an amazing number. I’ve heard that the losses were slowing, but obviously not enough to matter. (For the record, we get the Chronicle — and several other papers — delivered to our door each morning when we’re home.)

The Chronicle’s website has been among the most progressive anywhere, and it reflects the dilemma many publishers face. The site is free, with no registration requirements. There are ads, but not enough revenue to make up for the whacks to the print advertising that are hard to stop. The archives are also free and open — which I have to believe is on balance a revenue booster over the paywalled archives at most other local papers.

The Chronicle’s story about the impending cutbacks makes several glaring errors. Consider this sentence:

While an increasing number of people get news from online aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo, those stories are most often originally reported by print journalists.

In fact, they’re still getting their news from the originators of that print journalism. Google posts only headlines and a portion of the first paragraph of stories, and then sends interested readers to the original news organization’s own website. Yahoo does the same. When Yahoo publishes an entire story in certain cases, it does so under a contract with the publisher where, presumably, money changes hands from Yahoo to the publisher.

Then there’s this howler, albeit attributed to Rosenstiel:

He said the effect, even for people who don’t read the paper, “is that 25 percent of what goes on in the Bay Area won’t be covered. It will happen in the dark. … Our research shows that there is a lot of information that appears in a daily newspaper that doesn’t get covered by TV stations or citizen journalists or bloggers when a newspaper’s staff is cut.”

The premise here is that the Chronicle is actually reporting 100 percent of what goes on in the Bay Area now. I suspect Rosenstiel was either misquoted or was being ironic. He’s too smart and knowledgeable to believe this.

(Photo from New York State Library) 

The Open Net Intitiative global Internet filtering study was posted this morning, and it’s an incredible piece of work. From the BBC story on the launch:

The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests. The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering.

Not surprisingly, Google Maps and Skype were among the most-censored material.

Before Americans get smug about things, let me remind folks that while our federal government doesn’t do all that much of this stuff –a noteworthy recent exception is banning social networking sites from computers where the military has any influence — there’s all kinds of censorship taking place at state and local levels.

Schools and libraries around the country are routinely censoring computers to prevent kids from seeing even the most remotely objectionable material. It’s to the stage in many places where a student trying to gather material for a school report will be unable to find even relevant and useful sites.

Censorship is growing everywhere, it seems — and that includes America.

Meanwhile, congrats to my Berkman Center colleagues and others who worked on the project.

UPDATE: And props to Seth Finkelstein, frequent commenter here, who has been doing great work in this area for years.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed Internet innovators and users of all stripes a huge victory in a case involving a company called Perfect 10 versus Google:

The decision covers a wide-range of online copyright issues from in-line linking to fair use to the DMCA safe harbors and post-Grokster liability. Perfect 10 had sued Google for copyright infringement, claiming that its “Image Search” tool illegally reproduced and displayed P10 photos when it returned thumbnail results and framed third-party websites in response to search terms. It also claimed that Google was liable for contributing to Internet user infringement when users would look at pictures online that they had found via Google Image search.

Law blogger Eric Goldman is less sure of the sweeping nature of the ruling, saying:

It overturns the most pernicious part of the district court opinion holding that Google was directly infringing for displaying thumbnails in its image search. On the other hand, it opens up the possibility of new secondary liability by the search engines. However, on balance, this opinion is much better for the search engines than the lower court opinion, so it’s a mild win for them.

Wall Street Journal: Why China Relaxed Blogger Crackdown. Now, the Ministry of Information Industry, the agency responsible for the policy, has abandoned plans for a law requiring all Chinese blog service providers to ask their users for verifiable personal details before they can start blogging. Instead, the government is going for the soft approach.

An outbreak of common sense in Beijing’s halls of power…

Self-help for unnerved newspaper people includes feeling good about themselves, opines the New Republic:

How can newspapers recover their mojo? For starters, they should stop sounding apocalyptic. Their business is in much less of a crisis than you might imagine. The long-term decline in newspaper readership can be largely attributed to the death of the evening paper. The circulation of morning papers has actually risen by about 60 percent since 1980. And, for papers like The Washington Post that have shed print readers, Web traffic has grown at an astonishing pace. And profit margins at most papers remain high. As The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki pointed out last year, the McClatchy newspaper conglomerate, which purchased Knight Ridder last year, has healthier profit margins than, say, ExxonMobil.

Yet the issue is not profit margins, though they do matter. It is the unmistakable recent trends, which include ad revenue drops, serious circulation falls (at morning papers) and the simple fact that young people almost never buy newspapers.

The monopoly days are over, and the business model is unraveling at an accelerating rate. Newspaper business people understand this now. The New Republic should take note.

He explains:

This isn’t just about the demand side getting the power to supply. It’s about moving from use to manufacture, from passivity to engagement.

The Washington Post and others are reporting that the Pentagon is blocking soldiers’ access to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other social-media sites. The reasons: bandwidth pressures — an entirely bogus claim — and worries about the “disclosure of combat-sensitive material,” a more understandable consideration.

Combined with tighter restrictions on soldiers’ blogging, the plain intent by the military is to lock down what people in the field can tell the rest of us. Not surprising, perhaps, but disappointing.