Center for Citizen Media

Talking News Biz: Raising the Buffett/Loomis question again. Loomis, who received the lifetime achievement award last year from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, is writing about information disclosed in an annual report that she edited. Carmine Tiso, senior manager of communications for Fortune, told me in an e-mail, “Yes, Carol did edit the annual report, as she has mentioned in some of her previous stories on Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway in FORTUNE.” However, this point — that Loomis edited the annual report that she’s writing about — is not mentioned in any of the current stories.

Loomis is unquestionably a fine journalist, and Fortune a great magazine. But the situation is a huge blind spot for Fortune — and it’s not the first time the publication has neglected to disclose relevant conflicts.

Transparency is a requirement in this new era of journalism. We’re not seeing enough.

Robert Niles, asking rhetorically if blogs are a ‘parasitic’ medium, calls such charges

poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work. And by dismissing blogs as “parasitic,” newspaper journalists make themselves blind to the opportunities that blogging, as well as independent Web publishing in general, offer to both the newspaper industry and newspaper journalists.

It’s odd to see the continuing backlash from traditional journalism organizations, even as a few of them — and many more to come — start actually bringing their audiences into the process.

For the record, there are at least a dozen bloggers whose coverage of topics I care about do a considerably better job than any journalist working for a traditional media company.

Capitol Weekly: Out in cyberspace, looking in. For 60 years, the Capitol Correspondents Association has been charged with deciding which reporters should be sanctioned to cover the California Legislature. But a new set of bylaws aimed at restricting the access of partisan bloggers has set off a mini-firestorm within the Capitol, as California aims to become the first state in the nation to set out specific rules over how and whether bloggers should be credentialed.

The new rules — the final decision was reached Wednesday following a 34-3 vote by the Association’s members — require that reporters must get at least half of their earned income from media jobs, including self-employment, and that those employers be identified on the credentialing application. There are conflict-of-interest provisions, and a deliberate falsehood on the application is grounds for revoking the credential. The Association believes the new rules dealing with the electronic media will ease professional bloggers’ Capitol access.

This is a bogus way to “ease” access for bloggers; in fact, it virtually ensures that they’ll have none. If that’s not the design of the new rules, the people who made them created a dysfunctional process for making their decision.

The rules are designed “to separate hobbyists from professionals,” one member of the club is quoted as saying. That’s part of the problem, because it’s exclusionary in a way the pros can’t seem to grasp. And the income requirement — are they going to demand tax returns? — is just bizarre.

If the club members had been serious about finding a way to open up, it would have gone about its mission in a different way. What they’ve come up with tells me they’re more protective than ever of their privileges.

UPDATED

Howard Kurtz, in his online Media Notes Extra column at the Washington Post, fulminates about some disgusting comments posted on a well-known blog site. He writes:

I know we’re living in a polarized time. I know there are people who absolutely detest George Bush and Dick Cheney. I know they like to vent their spleen online, sometimes in vulgar terms, and hey, that’s life in a democracy.

But some of the comments posted after a suicide bomber blew himself up at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force Base, while Cheney was there–killing as many as 23 people–are nothing short of vile.

The comments appeared on the Huffington Post, which, to its credit, took them down. But some were preserved by Michelle Malkin, and I reproduce them here:

The comments he then reproduces are indeed vile. But what exactly is his point? That some speech is disgusting? We knew that already.

No, this is a slam that implicitly ties the commenter to a specific news operation. Despite the sanctimonious “to its credit” qualifier — and posting of an on-point response from Huffington — this ends up being, in part, about the Huffington Post. Why?

It takes about 30 seconds to find equivalent examples of beyond-the-pale comments on conservative blogs — precisely the same sort of hateful stuff with which Kurtz and Malkin (and others on the political right who made this an “issue”) tar the Huffington Post. I won’t flag those here, because it would be unfair to those sites. Perhaps Kurtz has launched a similar tirade against such speech, but I can’t find an example.

If Kurtz wanted to look at some genuine issues related to those comments, he could have. Such as:

• Is it reasonable to tar bloggers (or other publishers), even tangentially, with the sins of the bozos who make abusive comments? Of course it isn’t. Yet it happens all the time, as often as not a political tactic that unfortunately seems to work.
• Should popular political blogs should be more proactive in checking out and deleting hateful comments from the anonymous nutcases who post them? Maybe. But online communities do a pretty good job of flagging this crap; certainly the Huffington Post, like the Washington Post, has a link on every comment for people to report abusive behavior.
• Should readers ever take seriously what people post under pseudonyms? In general, no: People who refuse to stand behind their own words deserve little if any credibility, with very rare exceptions. A reader should approach a pseudonymous comment with the assumption that it’s false or without substance.

Too bad Kurtz doesn’t use his influential position to shine more light on things. Instead he impugns the people who merely offer a platform for others to speak. This is not just lazy, but mean.

Update: Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly created Kevin’s Law last year: “If you’re forced to rely on random blog commenters to make a point about the prevalence of some form or another of disagreeable behavior, you’ve pretty much made exactly the opposite point.”

New Orleans Times-Picayune: LHSAA rescinds block of photo sales. Calling the matter a misunderstanding, Louisiana High School Athletic Association Commissioner Tommy Henry on Tuesday rescinded a policy that sought to block newspapers from selling to the public photographs taken at state athletic championships.

No misunderstanding: As noted yesterday, this was a flat-out attempt to monopolize picture-taking at a public sports event. At least the officials are backing off their untenable position.

Ben Sheldon: The Future of Cable Access.

I believe that the important part of Cable Access Television is access. Access to:

* media production tools
* media distribution systems
* training to use them
* media literacy education to understand them

And all of this should be within the context of the needs of the local community.

New Orleans Times-Picayune: News photographers denied access to LHSAA’s girls state tournament. Several newspapers, including The Times-Picayune, were denied access to photograph the state girls high school basketball championships Monday night when they refused to sign a document limiting the right of newspapers to resell their photos to the public.

If I was the editor of one of these newspapers, I’d put a large house advertisement in today’s paper and on the website. It would invite people attending the game to shoot their own pictures, and send them into the paper, which would resell them on a revenue-sharing basis with the photographers.

I’d also encourage parents to shoot pictures and make them available on photo sharing sites such as Flickr. (I couldn’t find any such pictures today from last night’s game.)

Or are the officials of Louisiana High School Athletic Association planning to force all attendees to sign statements that they won’t sell pictures they take? Or ban cameras they don’t control (not that they could do this successfully in any event)?

The athletic association is living in another century. Then again, so are the newspapers.

See also this similar case in Wisconsin.

For the past several years, in every talk I’ve given about what traditional journalism organizations could do to involve communities in the reporting, I’ve suggested a “Pothole Map” — a mashup where citizens post the location of street potholes.

Bakersfield.com has done it — well, part of what I suggest. The other part would be to ask people to take photos of the potholes and post them along with the locations. (Update: Some potholes do have photos attached.)

Next, connect the map directly to the city government’s street department. Then keep track of which potholes get fixed in what order, and see which neighborhoods get faster service, and how big a pothole has to be to get the city’s attention.

lad to see an organization trying this. Now where’s everyone else?

OpenCongress “brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the story behind each bill” before the national legislature. Lots of intriguing ideas, and well worth a look.

(Note: One of the site’s funders, the Sunlight Foundation, has provided funding to us for a separate project.)

Yesterday’s Beyond Broadcast session on the future of public access TV was a valuable conversation. As expected, my earlier suggestion, which I hoped would generate a lively conversation — to phase it out with a blast of training for citizen media creators — wasn’t greeted with universal praise (ahem).

It was definitely lively, and we talked about many different thing. But Colin Rhinesmith, who attended and videotaped things,

would have liked to see more ideas upon which possibly a PEG Internet model could be established. Meaning, what might it look like? Where might its funding sources come from (if not from cable providers)? How might PEG Internet Centers differ from PEG TV Centers? What would this all really look like, feel like, and smell like?

Meanwhile, Danielle Martin took superb notes. Thanks, Danielle!