Center for Citizen Media

UPDATED (with response from one of the authors)

LA Observed has a post about how KRON TV in San Francisco disinvited the authors of a new book from a talk-show appearance after discovering that the book, No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle, takes shots at the crappy state of local TV news. My initial reaction was incredulity. I mean, how clueless is that kind of move?

Then I read the entire item, which includes an outraged email from the authors — Howard Rosenberg, formerly of the LA Times, and Charles Feldman — in which they write, among other things, the following line:

Government censorship is not nearly as bad as is corporate censorship–especially by a company that serves the public—or ought to.

I find myself hoping that the email by the authors is a fake. If it’s real, the authors need a refresher course in First Amendment 101, not to mention reality. The most likely explanation for the authors’ ridiculous statement is that a) they were pissed; b) they wrote their outraged note in haste; and c) they didn’t proofread it before they sent it along.

Why ridiculous? Journalists should understand that only governments can censor. Other entities can make it difficult to get heard by large numbers of people, but that is absolutely not the same thing as being forbidden to publish at all.

And surely the authors should understand something just as basic: Assume, for the sake of argument, that there is such as thing as “corporate censorship” (even though, as noted, the expression is a non sequitur). To say that it’s much worse than government censorship defies common sense, and makes you wonder about their sense of proportionality. When a local TV station obtusely rescinds an invitation to appear on a talk show, that’s not remotely in the ballpark of preventing the authors from exercising their right of free speech.

Is their book as sloppy as their logic here?

UPDATE: Howard Rosenberg sent me this email (and said I could post it here):

I read your blog about our KRON adventure and, after a bit of reflection, I take your point.

I am extremely concerned about the impact of corporate overgrowth in media. Speaking for myself, though, in no way do I equate corporate blacklisting (which I believe does occur) with the much bigger thumb of government censorship. Ask, say, ordinary Chinese or North Koreans which they would prefer.

Charles and I have speculated that the failure of our book to receive coverage from the 24-hour news networks is because it pretty well savages much of what they do. However, in no way can we document that. It’s a tough, competitive business, and there could be a myriad of other reasons why we haven’t made the cut.

KRON, of course, is another matter. Here we have a station rather belatedly canceling our interview because the news editor perceived (I can just see a10-watt light bulb clicking on in a thought balloon over his head) that our book attacks local news. It does not. The primary focus of our book is media speed and the dangers that we believe it poses for all of us. But even if the book did attack local news, so what?

The issue of our cancellation–news judgment driven totally by self-serving criteria–is much larger than the success or failure of our book. It’s an example of single-station TV news blacklisting, reflecting a lack of integrity that I found to be common among local newscasters when I covered them as TV critic for the L.A.Times. Arrrrgggggh! But censorship? Not at all. No one is silencing our voices.

And by the way, we did dash off our e-mail to KRON’s news director in anger and in haste. You might say we did it too fast to think.

All the best,

Howard Rosenberg

The distinction between blacklisting and censorship strikes me as precisely the correct one here. (I’ve changed the title of this post to remove the word “clueless” — plainly not correct at this point.)

NY Times: Consumers Union to Buy a Blog From Gawker. It will become part of a new division of Consumers Union, and the current editors will remain. No plans are under way to change the coverage or to begin charging for the site. “We don’t want to acquire the Consumerist and then squelch it in some way,” said Kevin McKean, vice president and editorial director of Consumers Union.

This is a smart move by Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, the online arm of which is one of Web publishing’s earliest and most important success stories. It broadens the brand, and it helps bring an organization that needed some updating into the 21st Century in other ways.

Gawker Media decided to get rid of Consumerist, part of a restructuring that the company’s founder and chief, Nick Denton, said was necessary to focus on what will be profitable in the face of what he predicted will be an advertising meltdown. There was an obvious fit with Consumers Union, an organization that has made its mistakes over the years but has stood up to enormous pressure from corporations that hated the organization’s independent ways.

Some critics of Consumer Reports have suggested that the wisdom of the consuming crowd is sufficient for learning about the kinds of products CR covers. It will be, someday, but I don’t think it’s there yet. CR’s relentless testing and usually sound editorial judgement are worth the price many of us (including me) pay for our subscriptions, online or offline. CR isn’t where I generally stop, but it’s often where I start looking for information on certain kinds of products.

Consumers Union hasn’t gone nearly far enough, however, in understanding the value of the crowd online. I hope the Consumerist purchase is a major step in that direction, but CU needs to recognize that the people who read its magazine and subscribe to the website are precisely the kinds of folks who could be much more helpful in creating the journalism that already stands apart from the competition. Reader surveys don’t even begin to do enough.

By the way, I don’t believe CU’s editorial director when he suggests that there will be no interference with the Consumerist’s edgy and sometimes over-the-top content. I’m guessing there will be subtle changes within a few months; note the wiggle room he left in that quote.

PS: I was amused, but shouldn’t have been, to see that Nick Denton gave the New York Times the scoop on this story. He’s is more old-media than people generally recognize.

(This is an HTML reprint of an essay (PDF) of the same title, recently published as part of the Media Re:public project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. I’m posting it here with some links to source material that don’t appear in the PDF version.)

Media are becoming democratized. Digital media tools, increasingly cheap and ubiquitous, have spawned a massive amount of creation at all levels, most notably from the ranks of the grassroots in contrast to traditional, one-to-many publications and broadcasts. The networks that made this possible have provided vast access to what people have created — potentially a global audience for anyone’s creation.

But the expanding and diversifying media ecosystem poses some difficult challenges alongside the unquestioned benefits. A key question: In this emergent global conversation, which has created a tsunami of information, what can we trust?

How we live, work, and govern ourselves in a digital age depends in significant ways on the answers. To get this right, we’ll have to re-think, or at least re-apply, some older cultural norms in distinctly modern ways.

These norms are principles as much as practices, and they are now essential for consumers and creators alike. They add up to a twenty-first-century notion of what we once called “media literacy,” which has traditionally all but missed the emerging methods of participation that are becoming such a key element of digital media. (This is only one reason why we should seek a replacement for the expression “media literacy” — because it connotes something that has become quaint to the point of near-irrelevance.)

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UPDATED

One of the most intriguing current media legal cases pits GateHouse Media, which owns a pile of newspapers in New England (and elsewhere) against the New York Times Co., owner of the Boston Globe and Boston.com. (UPDATE: A Judge has denied, for now, an injunction.) I’ve been looking at this from both sides’ perspectives, and this is not as simple as it looks on first glance.

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In this season for giving, let me point you to Global Voices Online, which aggregates blogs and other citizen-based media from around the globe. GV, a non-profit organization (I’m an advisor), has been supported in recent years with foundation grants, but it needs wider support. I’ve sent some funds, and hope you will consider doing so as well.

If I wasn’t in Phoenix today I’d be at Creative Commons’ Birthday Party 2008 in San Francisco tonight.

Creative Commons deserves your support even if you can’t go to the event. Donate here.

Over the past year and several months, Persephone Miel has been leading a Berkman Center project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, called Media Re:public:

an assessment of the changes in new media over the past several years and … a sober look at the successes and ongoing challenges.

The goal was to look at journalism in this new era, to figure out where it’s come and where it might be going. The word “sober” is particularly apt given the turmoil that has become standard in the craft and the business.

Today, Persephone and the center released her report overview (PDF), plus a collection of related essays. I wrote one of them, entitled “Principles for a New Media Literacy” — a piece that discusses ways we can and should be more activist as media consumers and creators.

Other contributors — here’s the downloads page (all PDFs) — included Ethan Zuckerman; Pat Aufderheide and Jessica Clark; Ernie Wilson; Tom Stites and John Kelly. You’ll also find case studies of several new-media projects.

There’s a tremendous amount of useful material in these pages. Take a look.

If you work at Yahoo and just got laid off, Om Malik wants to hear from you — and he posted that request on Twitter.

The people who run the Pulitzer Prizes, undoubtedly America’s premier journalism awards, have taken some useful steps into the 21st Century with new rules that welcome online-only entries. From the official rules (PDF):

Entries for journalism awards must be based
on material coming from a text-based United
States newspaper or news organization that
publishes—in print or online—at least
weekly during the calendar year; that is
primarily dedicated to original news
reporting and coverage of ongoing stories;
and that adheres to the highest journalistic
principles. Printed magazines and
broadcast media, and their respective Web
sites, are not eligible.

This will open the prizes to such brilliant journalists as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, among many others who’d been excluded in the past due to the anachronistic system that had ruled. Let’s celebrate that much progress.

But let’s also recognize that these new rules don’t begin to address the more fundamental issues about how journalism is changing. Excluding text-based journalism by magazines and broadcast media, for example, is illogical.

The release of the new rules — which are bound to evolve — frees me from an agreement of confidentiality I made earlier this year when asked by the Pulitzer Prize Board to answer some questions and offer my own suggestions about how the prizes should recognize changes in technology and journalistic practices.

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David Carr, NY Times: Stoking Fear Everywhere You Look. Every modern recession includes a media séance about how horrible things are and how much worse they will be, but there have never been so many ways for the fear to leak in. The same digital dynamics that drove the irrational exuberance — and marketed the loans to help it happen — are now driving the downside in unprecedented ways.

He’s right (assuming I understand his argument correctly) that the media were complicit in the bubble. I disagree, however, that the media are overly gloomy now.

Our society’s manic-depressive tendencies may well lead us into a steeper recession than is necessary in any economic sense. But people who save their money today are not being irrational, even though this is exactly the time you hope that enough people will spend to keep the economy from an absolute crater.

The media are only doing what they always do eventually: They get it right, way too late to make a difference.