Center for Citizen Media

Vox has launched with a fair amount of hype but also real promise. The key change is that the software easily enables private (or at least semi-private) conversations, a good idea.

The Berkman Center at Harvard invites local political bloggers to

join us for a celebration of bloggers, honoring the citizen journalists chronicling the Massachusetts 2006 governor’s race.

What: Blogging the Vote in 2006: A Celebration of Political Bloggers
When: Monday, October 30, 5pm
Where: Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, Cambridge, Second Floor

NY Times: A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data.

If things go as planned for liberal bloggers in the next few weeks, searching Google for “Jon Kyl,” the Republican senator from Arizona now running for re-election, will produce high among the returns a link to an April 13 article from The Phoenix New Times, an alternative weekly.

This kind of tactic leaves a sour taste. But it’ll be a common one in the future.

This phenomenon is about the nature of Google as much as the nature of politics. Pious “wish they wouldn’t” statements from the company don’t carry much weight when Google itself makes such things possible.

The Google-bomber in question is being disingenuous in the extreme about what he’s doing, however. From the end of the story:

“I think Internet users are very smart and most are aware of what a Google bomb is,” he said, “and they will be aware that results can be massaged a bit.”

Please. If most people using search engines are aware of this, the Democrats will nominate Jeb Bush as their next presidential candidate.

Somewhat related to the posting below, the Video the Vote project says it wants to:

protect the vote by being the eyes and ears where ballots are cast and counted on Election Day. We will document and report any irregularities that occur at polling places and boards of elections while they are happening, enabling the media and public to watch-dog the electoral process across our country.

If you’re a blogger or other citizen media creator and plan to cover happenings on Election Day, you may be wondering about some of the legal situations you may encounter.

Ask your questions at the question page for an upcoming Election Day Bloggers’ Legal Guide, and Stanford University Law students will work on getting the answers.

Our students at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism and the School of Information have done an amazing job pulling together the beta version of VoteGuide:

your interactive community participation portal to the (California) 11th Congressional district race. This non-partisan site looks at the issues and information about the candidates with help from you — the voters in the district. We need your help and input to make this site work.

We’ll be soliciting lots of feedback on this project, which is designed to create a template for future elections. If you live in the 11th district or know someone who does, please point them to the page that explains how they can help.

USA Today: Pundit Armstrong Williams settles case over promoting education reforms.

Armstrong Williams says the $34,000 he will repay to the U.S. government is a small price to pay to put a 2-year-old punditry scandal behind him.

Is he joking? This isn’t behind him.

Armstrong Williams will always be known as a classic opinion launderer. He took money for promoting government goals in media outlets that weren’t wise to the arrangement.

It was unethical. This settlement doesn’t address that, and if he thinks this salvages even a shred of his reputation, he’s wrong. Again.

Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post says “Tightened Belts Could Put Press In a Pinch“:

Real investigative reporting, as opposed to the what-happened-yesterday stuff, is time-consuming, risky and expensive. And as one news organization after another sheds staff in this tough financial climate, it’s worth considering what aggressive journalism has produced lately.

Yes, worth considering. But it’s also worth remembering the Big Media aren’t the only places where aggressive journalism occurs.

One, which has been around for a while, is the Center for Public Integrity, which does brilliant investigative journalism. It relies on grants and donations, a business model that has supported terrific stuff.

Another, newer project, is Jay Rosen’s budding NewAssignment.net, which has a chance to help redefine the nature of the investigative project in a networked age.

And let’s not forget that the best reporting on government spying on Americans has been done by that famous journalism organization (not), the American Civil Liberties Union. A new report, based on information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, is an example.

We should worry about the economic implosion that is costing jobs and sapping resources from investigative reporting. But many in the Big Media have been losing their appetite for this for some time.

We need to find ways to move ahead on the assumption that the negative trend will continue.

The ombudsman of the New York Times, in his current column, decides somewhat incoherently, that the paper was wrong to blow the whistle on a semi-secret government spying program targeting, among others, U.S. citizens.

If the job of the press isn’t to tell us when such things are going on, then the press has no job at all.

At the Providence Journal, where a systems glitch made for big problems, Sheila Lennon volunteered:

to stay home and take emails from reporters and editors. I would publish The Providence Journal’s breaking news on the Web by myself all day from our home den, barefoot. I would email headlines, permalinks and timestamps back to the newsroom to be manually posted on the homepage. No one inside the Journal could see any of it.