Center for Citizen Media

UPDATED

Two interesting developments today at the New York Times online:

The first, and most noteworthy, is the paper’s welcome discovery that aggregation of and links to things it didn’t produce in-house improve the audience experience. As the graphic shows, the green-highlighted items below the story summaries are links to coverage in other media — including bloggers and direct competitors. The technology behind this feature comes from Blogrunner, a news aggregator the Times acquired a while back.
No, this is not a new idea. In fact, it’s as old as the Web, and the Times’ own Frank Rich has been doing it liberally for some time in his Sunday column. But to see the Times do it in this way — on the home page (and section homes) is a step forward. It moves the paper much more into the linked world we all now inhabit.

The other interesting item in the online edition is an exchange between U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat who was the subject of a tough investigative piece recently. Rangel replied, and the Times responded right next to his long letter on this page.

The numbers — footnotes, essentially — in the Rangel letter correspond to the newspaper’s responses to his points. Oddly there are no hyperlinks, but that’s a relatively small quibble.

There are even better ways to display these kinds of exchanges. But it’s great to see the paper experimenting with this kind of conversational journalism. I hope these will become more common.

UPDATE: Poynter Online interviewed Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who said that the paper hadn’t done anything quite like this before. But he added, “I don’t expect it to be the last.”

(Disclosure: I’m own a small amount of New York Times Co. stock, which is worth a lot less than I paid for it…)

And the PDF fact sheet.

This devices, which won’t be available until next year (probably spring), is potentially the closest thing yet to the perfect tool for folks who are looking for the ultimate in smart phones with serious text capability. Incredible specs…

I drool.

I’m a signer of a letter on a new site called “An Open Transition,” where a group of folks led by Larry Lessig:

• celebrates the incoming administration’s decision to put a Creative Commons license on its Change.Gov transition website, thereby allowing anyone to share, remix and otherwise reuse and copy the material there;
• and asks that this philosophy be extended widely in the new administration, and around the government in general.

Politico has a short story on this here.

UPDATED

The New York Times’ David Barstow has an astonishing piece in today’s paper, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” about former “drug czar” and retired general Barry McCaffrey, one of many retired military people working as supposedly independent analysts for various news organizations but who are anything but independent.

The story’s biggest surprise — perhaps it should not be — is NBC News’ defense of its failure to require disclosure of McCaffrey’s rampant conflicts of interest. To call the network’s defense pathetic is to give it more weight than it deserves. Here’s the relevant quote, which is breathtaking in its arrogance:

The president of NBC News, Steve Capus, said in an interview that General McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis for NBC. He described General McCaffrey as an “independent voice” who had courageously challenged Mr. Rumsfeld, adding, “There’s no open microphone that begins with the Pentagon and ends with him going out over our airwaves.”

McCaffrey has been occasionally critical of Rumsfeld, yes. But that is absolutely not the point here. The issues are his wide-ranging, flagrant and undisclosed conflicts of interest and NBC’s indifference to integrity.

Here’s Spencer Ackerman’s appropriate characterization of this rancid system:

But the scope of McCaffrey’s hustle is really breathtaking. Barstow demonstrates that many, if not most, of the pronouncements he made on TV about the wars benefited one or another defense contractor who employed him. That’s the way the scheme worked: Company hires retired general to use his connections to its benefit. Retired general accepts special grants of access from the office of the secretary of defense that benefit both his TV career and his consulting career. Retired general proclaims on TV things that benefit both the secretary and the company — or, when circumstances necessitate, the company at the expense of the secretary. TV viewer, looking for informed analysis of confusing wars, is unaware of any of this. Welcome to the new military-media-industrial complex.

Bottom line: McCaffrey is venal, greedy and unethical. But as a news organization, NBC is downright corrupt.

MORE: Salon’s Glenn Greenwald notes NBC’s “ongoing disgrace,” citing reporting on these issue years ago in the Nation magazine, the NY Times’ expose from last spring and his own reporting. His characterization is entirely correct.

Final word to Matthew Yglesias:

But rather than focusing on McCaffrey and his issues, it’s worth contemplating the breathtaking lack of integrity on display from the television networks here. As I said, Barstow published a piece on this back in April. None of the TV networks addressed the issue he raised in anything resembling a serious manner. And, again, we now have NBC News caught flat-out in the midst of corruption, deceiving their viewers. And NBC News isn’t sorry. They’re not apologizing. They’re not ashamed. Because they’re beyond shame. They never had a reputation for honor, so they don’t even see this sort of thing as damaging.

Every time I load a new page on the Washington Post’s website, the following pop-over ad interferes with my reading.

I keep clicking the X in the corner indicating my lack of interest in participating in the survey, but to no avail. This thing won’t leave me alone.

So I guess I’ll stay off the Post’s website until this obnoxious ad goes away, which I hope will be soon.

I don’t plan to click through to that one…

But to the rest of you: Happy Thanksgiving, our finest holiday.

Take a look at today’s Wikipedia entry on today’s Mumbai terrorist attacks — a comprehensive and valuable addition to the breaking news we’re getting from TV and other sources. There are two fundamental elements to note: the rapid updating and the long list of links at the bottom.

No, we can’t fully trust what we see here, because Wikipedia is susceptible to tampering. And yes, it relies on traditional journalism sources for much of the information. But this resource is immensely valuable as a backgrounder.

Also: Once I wondered whether Wikinews would be a valuable journalism source. It’s increasingly clear that Wikipedia itself is vastly more important when it comes to major events. Compare the Wikipedia entry above to the Wikinews Mumbai entry, and you’ll see why.

Excellent round-up and sound predictions by Jeff Jarvis today in “A scenario for news” — and some good reasons not to be pessimistic.

There are big changes afoot in the Knight Fellowships program at Stanford University:

Beginning with the 2009-10 fellowship year, the program will put a new emphasis on journalistic innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership.

These are among the premier journalism fellowships in the U.S., and the changes — among other things, non-traditional journalists will have a better shot at the program — could have a positive impact on journalism over time. (Note: I was on the task force that helped Stanford re-evaluate the fellowships.)

Take a look, and consider applying.

Mark Glaser: MediaShift . Can Crowdfunding Help Save the Journalism Business? Bands do it. Filmmakers do it. President-elect Barack Obama made an artform out of it. “It” is crowdfunding, getting micro-donations through the Internet to help fund a venture. The question is whether crowdfunding can work on a larger scale to help fund traditional journalism, which is being hit by the twin storms of readership and ad declines at newspapers and the economic recession.