Center for Citizen Media

UPDATED

About a decade ago, Bill Gates was telling people that Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and other media properties, was a mismanaged brand. He was right then, and Rupert Murdoch is making that point now with his bid for the company.

Murdoch is a modern media baron in the style of the worst yellow journalists of the past. He would be a dreadful proprietor of the Journal, which carries a banner of honorable, tough journalism — apart from the editorial pages, of course — that makes it one of the treasures of press integrity today.

Gates is a robber baron, a throwback to the predators of the late 1800s and early 1900s who almost destroyed American capitalism with their hunger for wealth and power in a time when government cared little for a fair or honest marketplace. Yet in the right circumstances, Gates would be the ideal buyer of Dow Jones. Let me explain.

As the newspaper business model continues to unravel, one of the key issues before us as a society is how we’re going to preserve great journalism. Newspapers, more than any other media form to date, have been — for all their obvious flaws — the most important source of great journalism.

Several newspaper companies, such as Nelson Poynter’s St. Petersburg Times in Florida, have been put into public trusts with both media and educational aims. In a perfect world, Dow Jones’ Bancroft family would do the same. But while it’s clear that the various relatives are unhappy about selling to a Murdoch, they’re not interested in giving up the wealth, either.

Bill Gates needs no more wealth. He has been slowly but surely turning his life from predator to humanitarian, the latter via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that is doing wonders for public health around the globe.

The foundation also has an educational mission, a less known but important operation in its own right. Suppose the foundation, with a new infusion of Gates’ personal wealth, were to buy Dow Jones and turn it into a public trust along the lines of the Poynter Institute, where the profits from the newspaper subsidize the educational mission.

What would be the that aim for a new kind of Dow Jones? Economic education — something that is woefully lacking in America and most other places. The possibilities would be endless.

Would Gates be willing to apply some of his wealth for this goal, and to apply some of his business acumen to helping the Journal leverage its assets for such a worthy purpose? Would he and his foundation name trustees who’d preserve the essential editorial independence that has made the Journal so great? Those, of course, are the multi-billion-dollar questions. But there is no question that journalism and the public at large would be well-served.

I’ll bet the Bancrofts would sell the company for this purpose, and for considerably less than the premium Murdoch is offering. (I own a small amount of Dow Jones stock and would happily forego the additional gains.) They’d get plenty of money, without extracting the last possible pennies, and they’d have the satisfaction of seeing the institution built by their family remain the vital part of American journalism — and protector of truly free markets — that it has been for some time.

UPDATE

In a letter to the Bancrofts, Murdoch tries to assuage the family that he’d ensure the integrity of the Wall Street Journal’s news pages. But he prefaces his promises — mere words — with this:

I don’t apologize for the fact that I have always had strong opinions and strong ideas about newspapers; but I have also always respected the independence and integrity of the news organizations with which I am associated.

Oh, please. Murdoch and his underlings have frequently interfered with the journalism. And at least some of those news organizations are emblematic for their visible lack of integrity.

A better approach for Murdoch would have been to admit that he’s interfered with his various properties, and only then promise not to do it in this case.

This article, “10 Things We Hate About Apple,” caused a mini-revolution inside of PC World, a magazine that is part of the IDG empire. Harry McCracken, the editor in chief, quit in protest when the story was killed but returned when it was reinstated and the publisher reassigned to other IDG duties.

It was a victory for McCracken, obviously, but also for editorial integrity and journalism.

I’ve been playing with Nokia’s latest mobile device — the N95 — and consider it a breakthrough in digital media.

Oh, it’s a phone, naturally. But it’s so much more, including WiFi, GPS, MP3 recording and playback, a 5-megapixel digital camera and MPEG 4, 30-frames-per-second video recording and playback, Web browsing, email and, of course, text. There’s more, but you get the idea.

The journalistic potential for the N95 is simply enormous. My UC-Berkeley students took some phones Nokia loaned us to New Orleans to work on a class project (more on that very soon), and I have plans for several cool experiments in the near future.

I wish it had a full QWERTY keyboard, and I’m sure that a slight re-design could make that happen. But for now I believe this device has carved out the sweet spot in the mobile digital content arena.

Look for a much more detailed report soon.

LA Times: Local news reporting outsourced to India. James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired two reporters last weekend to cover the Pasadena City Council. One lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year. The other will work in Bangalore for $7,200.The council broadcasts its meetings on the Web. From nearly 9,000 miles away, the outsourced journalists plan to watch, then write their stories while their boss sleeps — India is 12.5 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.

“A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages,” said Macpherson, 51, who used to run a clothing business with manufacturing help from Vietnam and India.

For the money he’s paying, he could hire local bloggers. They’d do it better, with more perspectives — and have the advantage of, uh, being there.

NY Times: Facebook to Offer Free Classifieds. Facebook, the social networking Web site, is adding free classified ad listings, putting it into competition with dozens of established companies like Craigslist and many newspapers.

It’s too simplistic to say it’s yet another nail in newspapers’ coffins. What’s notable is that in a sense everyone can offer classifieds these days. And, before long, everyone will.

Mark Glaser (MediaShift): Hyper-Local Citizen Media Sites Learn How to Serve Small Communities.

At NewAssignment.net, John McQuaid looks incredulously into the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s decision to turn top-notch columnist James Lileks into a street reporter. We need all the street reporting we can get, but this is nuts. Quote:

The Star Tribune’s decision to eliminate James Lileks’s column and reassign him to a beat as a local reporter is so self-evidently dumb, an Umbridge-worthy example of the bureaucratic mentality run amok, that you have to wonder if newspapers – especially the once-robust, medium-sized daily paper – have indeed reached some kind of suicidal turning point.

Like McQuaid, I occasionally disagree with Lileks’ views. But I read his blog religiously. He is genuinely one of a kind, with a voice all his own, and a rare talent in the newspaper business.

Utterly bizarre and self-defeating. I predict Lileks will have a new — and better — opinion-writing gig in short order. And the Star-Tribune will have contributed in a big way to its own eventual demise.

(This posting appeared today in the Washington Examiner newspaper.)

In this impossibly early presidential campaign season, so-called “debates” are already making modest waves. They could be much more useful, and there’s promising progress to suggest that they will.

On May 5, we learned of one potential bit of progress. CNN announced that, after the broadcast of an upcoming presidential-candidate debate New Hampshire, it will make the entire video available under a copyright license that permits wide re-use of the material in a variety of ways — and will do so with all future such debates it broadcasts.

This was a breakthrough, in part because CNN recognized that it should not “own” such material. Rather, as the network said in its announcement: “The presidential debates are an integral part of our system of government, in which the American people have the opportunity to make informed choices about who will serve them. Therefore, CNN debate coverage will be made available without restrictions at the conclusion of each live debate.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, the CNN announcement came after a competing network chose to grossly restrict re-use of another debate — and after a campaign by public-spirited people in favor of more openness, a campaign that may have influenced Barack Obama, a leading Democratic candidate, to urge his party toward wide distribution of its own event videos.

The CNN competitor, MSNBC, showed the opposite of good corporate or journalistic citizenship. With a debate it put on in South Carolina, the network insisted on odiously stringent restrictions, as media critic Jeff Jarvis noted after getting a copy of the “Usage Rules” from a source at NBC.

Oh, it was available (as I was writing this) on the MSNBC website. But it was online in a format that not everyone can use, and was festooned with annoying advertising.

This represented nothing but control-freakery on the part of MSNBC, plus good old fashioned greed. If anyone was going to make money, or journalistic hay, from the event, it would be just one organization.

Now, these “debate” events may not be the height of political discourse. If anything, they’re relatively trivial joint press conferences, nothing like the serious conversations that we need to make serious decisions about the next leadership of this nation.

But the CNN precedent is important. Let’s see what people do with the videos that come out of the CNN-sponsored events. Let’s see how far and wide the videos spread to people (like me) who won’t have time to watch them live, and how they are used to create new political journalism and opinion.

If we do it right in this election cycle, the conversation will include not just the candidates and Big Media, but the citizens as well. Making the videos available for remixing is a start, but only a start.

We could have more serious debates if the candidates used the Internet better. How?

For starters, let’s recall a mini-controversy from the 2004 election. Some people suspected that President Bush might have been “wired” with some kind of radio device during a debate with John Kerry, and suggested he was getting answers to questions from a back room. I didn’t believe that at the time, but I did ask a question: So what if he is?

In fact, I think a real debate on the Net would include not just a candidate (for any office) but also his or her staff, advisors and supporters. Sure, I like to see how quickly and sensibly a candidate can respond in real time, but that’s not the only quality I seek.

I’m looking for candidates who know how to get good answers to difficult questions, too. Why not have a debate that stretches out over days or even weeks, where candidates and supporters can delve more deeply into the issues, respond to each other and seriously get at the core of these things? Wouldn’t we learn more from that than whether he or she can regurgitate canned statements? I would.

We can update debating this time, with remixes, complex Web exchanges and much more. Give CNN a hat tip. They’re helping to spark the conversations.

Jay Rosen offers “Assignment Zero, Updated. With Initial Results”.

On the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the publisher of the largest daily newspaper in Arkansas writes:

One has to wonder how many of the newspaper industry’s current problems are self-inflicted. Take free news. News has become ubiquitous, free, and as a result, a commodity. Anytime you are trying to sell something that becomes a commodity, you have lost much of the value in providing that product or service.

Meanwhile, from Jason Fry’s Real Time column in the same paper:

Whether or not content creators like it, this is the age of fragmentation. In industry after industry, consumers are voting with their feet against old methods of packaging and distributing information. They want to pick and choose what’s of interest to them, without having to pay for or wade through what isn’t. That change, midwived by technology, has shaken or shattered content companies’ business models. It’s made everything they do more risky. And it’s stripped them of power they once enjoyed, forcing them to work with new companies and industries that somehow got to set the rules. Faced with such a situation, it’s understandable that content creators are angry. But the chance to set the ground rules passed some time ago, and it’s high time for content creators to realize that and adjust.

Both of these guys are right in their own way. But Fry has a much clearer understanding of the real business reality — that the monopoly days for daily newspapers are done.