Center for Citizen Media

Wall Street Journal: McClatchy’s Minneapolis Sale Aids Web Efforts. One of the biggest believers in the newspaper field sold its largest paper yesterday, as McClatchy Co. agreed to sell the Minneapolis Star Tribune to private-equity firm Avista Capital Partners for $530 million. The price is less than half of what McClatchy paid for the paper in 1998, when it bought the Star Tribune from Cowles Media for $1.2 billion. The value of papers has declined as they face declining readership and a fragmented media environment.

Yes, there were some favorable tax consequences, as the story notes. And, yes, there’s some other logic to this deal.

But half the price of the original purchase? And no interest from other newspaper companies?

Those are signs of deepening malaise, or worse, in the newspaper business. I still own some McClatchy stock (residual holding from Knight Ridder shares I owned before the company was sold last year), and plan to keep them. But this sale is not the kind of news a shareholder likes to hear.

Whatever our faith or belief, let’s all work toward a better world. Happy holidays.

(Note: The picture is from Vermont, just outside of Montpelier.)

A business-oriented website all but accused the editor of Men’s Health magazine, in a blog posting on Yahoo, of inserting an advertising plug into his copy. Oh, there was a disclaimer of sorts — maybe the blog writer “really loves the product,” suggested Dan Zoll in his posting — but the rest of the piece left almost no doubt in my mind about what he was thinking.

Reading the posting at issue, I confess I was also somewhat suspicious of the wording (and think the product plug raised a reasonable question). But, as I asked in a note to AllBusiness, which flagged the item in the first place: Did anyone ask the writer, or anyone at Yahoo, for a comment before essentially accusing the editor, his magazine and Yahoo of unethical behavior?

The AllBusiness writer said, no, he hadn’t. Uh, oh.

Later, he wrote again to say he’d posted this update, acknowledging that his initial posting had made an incorrect assumption. There was no business relationship. (As of this writing, the original posting was unchanged — it, too, needs an update.)

Seems to me this is an almost perfect example of a tendency that’s all too common in media today, and not just in blogs: People find it easy to fire before aiming. (I’ve done it myself, though I don’t think I’ve ever raised ethical questions about someone else in this way.)

A lesson here, I hope…

(Disclosure: I’m teaching a course at UC Berkeley with Bill Gannon, Yahoo’s editorial director.)

NY Times: Saturday Night Live – Special Treat in a Box.

Given the subject matter, it was little surprise that NBC bleeped a recurring word in the chorus 16 times. But soon after the broadcast concluded at 1 a.m. Sunday, viewers who’d seen the bit on TV (and others who had just heard about it) could find the uncensored version online. That’s because the network itself had placed it on its own Web site and YouTube.com, under the headings “Special Treat in a Box” or “Special Christmas Box.”

The blue-noses of America want to turn broadcasting into a medium suitable only for children, and they’re having good luck with this campaign. To achieve their ends, they’ve turned the Federal Censorship, uh, Communications Commission into an agency whose job is frequently to assess big fines against broadcasters for all kinds of alleged violations of decency. Broadcasters, at long last, have begun to fight back, but late in the game.

Meanwhile, sensible adults are turning to cable, satellite and the Internet for video entertainment that has more of an edge. And so, it seems are the broadcasters themselves.

NBC tells the Times this kind of posting will probably be an exception. Maybe. But in the end it’ll be the rule, because as long as broadcasters have fewer First Amendment rights than other media, broadcast TV and radio will be less interesting media.

Rebecca MacKinnon has compiled a thorough and fascinating study of foreign correspondents’ views in China of the blog scene there — “Blogs and China correspondence.” Most interestingly, she says in an email:

people generally found the question comparing “reliability” of blogs vs. msm to be completely beside the point.

To creat the Tunisian Prison Map, Sami Ben Gharbia “pulled data from Human Rights NGOs report as well as a temporary list of Tunisian prisons prepared by Tsar Boris on TUNeZINE website.”

Brilliant use of mashups, in a worthy cause.

The Media Bloggers Association‘s Bob Cox has relaunched a website for the organization he founded and runs. Lots of interesting new ideas here. Bob is among the people who are working hard to improve citizen media.

Editor & Publisher reports that Wendy McCaw, the eccentric owner of the Santa Barbara (California) News-Press, isn’t just presiding over the meltdown of a newspaper. She’s suing a freelance journalist who wrote about her activities, claiming an American Journalism Review article was defamatory.

Needless to say, people familiar with journalism and the First Amendment are incredulous. E&P quotes several:

“I am surprised that any publisher would do this,” said Gene Roberts, the legendary former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and part-time instructor at the University of Maryland, where AJR is published. “It’s pretty clear that there is an owner there with no sense and no respect for newspaper traditions and for the First Amendment.”

Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, agreed. “It is outrageous,” he said. “It is especially a betrayal of the principles that most journalists understand for a libel suit of this kind to be filed. It is apparently a grudge.”

David Ardia, who practiced media law and is heading up a soon-to-launch citizen-media law project, is incredulous from a legal perspective. He said in an e-mail:

“It’s unfathomable from so many angles. Can you imagine what a case like this would look like in discovery, as senior editors from the Santa Barbara News-Press are forced to sit for depositions probing whether their publisher is a tyrant? She must be out of her mind.”

UPDATED

SimplyHeadlines delivers headlines to mobile devices. It’s an obvious and useful tool.

Knight Ridder, the company I used to work for, registered the domain Headlines.com in 1998 — and proceeded to do nothing with it.

UPDATE: Mark Potts tells me: “Knight Ridder didn’t register headlines.com in 1998 — they got it as part of the breakup of New Century Network, which had owned the URL previously.”

New Century Network was the newspaper industry’s failed attempt, back in the mid-1990s, to counter the competition that more far-sighted folks saw coming from the online world. The venture was a fiasco (see this BusinessWeek story), to put it mildly.

About two years ago I gave a talk to some senior people people at Knight Ridder, before it was sold to McClatchy. I begged them to use this domain, or sell it to me so I could do something with it. I believe they thought I was joking about the latter idea. I wasn’t. Any random person off the street could have made something of Headlines.com.

The domain now points to the “RealCities” network that McClatchy bought along with Knight Ridder’s digital arm. Maybe the new ownership will do something with it. Or maybe not.

Digg has new features: a video by co-founder Kevin Rose explains some of it.