1 February 2009 >>
Here’s a TV report from 1981 predicting the future of newspapers. What’s interesting is how much of it misses the mark...and how much of it doesn’t.
There were certain words that would pop up from time to time in the Associated Press stories that moved onto the site that were a bit salacious, or unacceptable to post.
“We don’t have the staff to monitor all the Hollywood stories,” news director Fred Jackson said yesterday, “so we wanted an automated function.” He said they put up the filter about a month or so ago.
One word they wanted to filter was “gay.” The site felt that the term put the matter of homosexuality “in a positive light,” Jackson said, when the evangelical Christian organization was much opposed. So when a wire story referred to gay marriage, for example, the phrase would automatically appear as “homosexual marriage.”
Worked fine until Sunday, when the AP reported that “Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials.” The story was headlined “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.”
“On Saturday,” the story said, “Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat...”
That’s world champion sprinter Tyson Gay, of course.
17 June 2008 >>
The Associated Press, which is currently threatening legal action against bloggers who quote excerpts of AP stories, has been caught extensively quoting from a blog without permission.
The copyright doctrine of fair use is generally lenient in allowing works to be quoted or reproduced for news and commentary purposes. Yet earlier this year, the Associated Press forced the website SnappedShot to take down various AP photos which had been posted for the purpose of criticism. Brian C. Ledbetter, who runs SnappedShot, believed he was well within his fair use rights, but he lacked the resources to fight the media powerhouse.
And within the last week, it came to light that AP lawyers threatened the proprietor of another blog for posting excerpts of AP articles. Considering that none of the excerpts posted were longer than 79 words, the AP’s stance seemed extreme to many, and the incident led to a lot of outrage online.
In a news item about the e-mail from Judge Kozinski’s wife that I posted on this site, an AP article lifted numerous passages.
I counted 154 words quoted from my post. That’s almost twice the number of words contained in the most extensive quotation in the Drudge Retort.
So am I going to be an ass and threaten to charge them, or sue them, or demand that they remove the quotes? Of course not. They benefited from my content and I benefited from their link.
Just like when the Drudge Retort quoted them.
And I’m going to go on quoting AP stories, within fair use guidelines.
And if they start threatening me, I’ll have to remind them that they did the same to me.
29 May 2008 @ 6:50AM >>
An overwrought Columbia Journalism Review column declares that the establishment media is a victim of big, bad bloggers and financiers who shockingly believe that complacency is not the proper response for an industry in a death spiral:
We the media are obsessed with our destroyers. We could even be said to love (or love to write about or edit) the many individuals who are taking us down. These include the mega-moguls and their hedge fund cousins who are or would like to buy newspapers in the raw, as well as the fashionable blog upstarts who are together profiting from and creating the end-of-media-as-we-knew-it.
[...]
Today’s media gazing, in fact, can seem like an endless noir movie—a danse macabre with our assassins and those benefiting from our demise. We watch as they develop, learning a few of their tricks as they destroy us with better ones, all the time ceding our platforms to them.
You don’t have to be Anna Freud to figure that our fascination with these people is “identification with the aggressor.” And we are equal opportunity identifiers—we embrace the aggressor vultures from on high and the aggressor barnacles from down low that are chipping away at our industry. Why all the ink—or should I say code—wasted on our young or rich oppressors?
It would seem to be a defense mechanism, where a person who is externally threatened and torn down by an authority figure identifies with the source of the threat. According to psychoanalytic literature, the person does so by appropriating the aggression or taking on the qualities of the threatening figure. And when you identify with your aggressor—we, us, the victims—ostensibly replace our sense of fear and helplessness at our oncoming fragmented and demonetized media with the illusion of omnipotence. For a brief moment, we have the power of the Falcones, the Murdochs, the bloggers who just don’t care about anything...
[...]
I looked up the “cure” for identification for our aggressors and of course I should have known better. There never is a cure for anything. But there is a recommendation that the patient—our industry—once bullied and now eager to serve or appropriate their defilers, start to find some “healthier” role models for relating. We the patients have, after all, developed an unnerving attachment to the people that are taking us down. But we may actually be “testing.” looking around for “healthier relationships,” and not finding them—in the words of one philosopher deciding, apocalyptically, to “enjoy our symptom.”
Yikes. This writer needs a little couch time to work through these complex emotions, or she will be forever in denial of what really ails the establishment media.
While it is true that the quickening pace of technological change caught the old media off guard, much of the media’s current predicament is largely of its own making. By intertwining their most valuable differentiator (facts gathered at some expense) with something that’s increasingly ubiquitous and free (opinions), media outlets diminish the perceived value of their product and send a muddled message to news consumers.
Although there are bloggers who have done excellentfirst-handreporting, most bloggers are not equipped to compete with the core competency of large news-gathering organizations. Instead, bloggers tend to function as filters, amplifiers, analyzers and fact-checkers for stories that have been reported (and under-reported) by the establishment media.
To put it not-so-flatteringly, we bloggers are parasitic; we synthesize our product by relying on output from the establishment media. But we’re symbiotic parasites, and our existence benefits the media in numerous ways, not the least of which is by driving traffic (and therefore ad revenue) to media websites.
Unfortunately, as this CJR piece shows, some in the media view bloggers as the enemy, a tormentor that must be defeated. By seeing bloggers as direct competitors, outlets put themselves in a position of competing on their greatest weakness while at the same time undermining their greatest strength.
Instead of competing in the arena of gathered facts, many in the traditional media have responded to the rise of online outlets by deciding that they need more opinion in their product, not less. The problem with that is, the news media has been insisting for decades that they’re “objective.” Personally, I don’t think true media objectivity is even possible, but the claim of objectivity becomes even less credible as the media adds more and more opinion to their product.
Yet under the guise of “news analysis,” “putting things in context,” giving “perspective” and “helping you understand,” the news media insists on wrapping what should be its unique product—hard-to-gather facts—in packaging that makes their product look similar to everything else that’s available online for free.
How can media outlets get themselves out of this predicament? They should either embrace opinion journalism fully and drop the pretense of objectivity, or they should get out of the opinion business altogether if they insist on being seen as objective.
The first option would have outlets finally own up to their biases and admit to being in the opinion business, but then they’d compete even more directly with bloggers. This would also pull the media further away from the market that their news-gathering infrastructure is uniquely positioned to serve. But at least by being truthful with news consumers about the perspectives that shape their presentation of the news, some of the media’s tattered credibility might be restored.
The other option is for news outlets to go in the opposite direction and purge the opinion from their offerings. This means that adjectives and adverbs should almost never appear in reporting. It also means that outlets would have to open up all their raw notes, transcripts and other reportorial artifacts for public inspection and stop relying on unnamed sources. Otherwise, only the gullible would continue to believe in the Objectivity Fairy.
Marketers who specialize in product positioning know that the average consumer maintains only one mental impression of a brand. No matter how carefully an outlet tries to separate the presentation of opinion from that of news, at the end of the day, the typical news consumer is still left with a single aggregate perception of that outlet.
In other words, each outlet as a whole will either be seen as objective, or it will not.
Some in the media don’t want to face this truth and would prefer to lash out at imagined external enemies. But by mixing opinion with news while still claiming objectivity, the media sends a contradictory message that causes distrust of its product.
For an industry whose long-term capital is trust, this is one wound that can’t be blamed on blogs. It’s self-inflicted.
Called “Worst Email Ever: The Internet’s Inbox,” what the site chronicles is fairly obvious.
Had I known there would eventually be an appropriate venue for airing some of the venomous missives sent my way, I would have made a practice of hanging on to many more of them.
Still, I was able to dig up a few, and I’ve sent them along to Mr. Malice. These e-mails are now publicly available for all to enjoy.
P.S. For you Harvey Pekar fans out there, here’s the scene from David Letterman that couldn’t make it into the film American Splendor. Yikes.
3 April 2008 @ 8:05AM >>
Spam blogs, sometimes called “splogs,” are phony blogs set up to earn money by displaying ads. Splogs steal content from other sites so that they appear to the untrained eye as genuine blogs. When people conduct web searches, that stolen content drives traffic to the site, raising the revenue from advertising.
It’s a sleazy practice, and at times, I’ve seen posts from this site appear on splogs. Recently, I found a splog that copies text from this site, but it also does something new: it changes certain words in the post to modify the content slightly.
I realize that by linking to the splog, I am helping them achieve their goal of increased traffic. Still, it’s an interesting development in the evolution of spam, and it seems worthy of note.
25 March 2008 >>
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is undergoing an assault in an all-out wikifight.
Recently, FIRE’s Wikipedia page and that of the organization’s president, Greg Lukianoff, have been repeatedly modified to insert bogus claims trying to paint the organization as some sort of right-wing front group.
It’s ironic that FIRE finds itself the subject of a partisan smear campaign. FIRE as a group is quite principled in its non-partisan nature, and its staffers are more intellectually diverse than many colleges seem to be. Over the years, they’ve provided consistent and unwavering support for liberals and conservatives alike—and to folks of just about any other school of thought represented on college campuses.
All of the proof for this is quite easy to find, as FIRE’s record is well-documented and readily available online.
Earlier today, Lukianoff singled out Simon DeDeo, one of the Wikipedia editors, for his “many errors.” To his enormous credit, when presented with the facts, Mr. DeDeo retracted his “remarks on [FIRE], some of which were in error and others of which were I think overly harsh and rhetorical.”
Unfortunately for FIRE, the rest of the group’s wikicritics may not be as intellectually honest as Mr. DeDeo.
10 February 2008 >>Update: The review program has now ended. The offer below is no longer valid. If you’re interested in seeing the film, you can now download a copy from the Indoctrinate U online store.
Within a matter of days, we will be ready to launch the Indoctrinate U online store, where we will be offering the film for download as MPEG-4 files and ISO DVD files. MPEG-4 files are playable on Windows, Mac and Linux, and ISO files can also be used to create your own DVD copies of the film playable on virtually all home DVD equipment. All you need is a computer with a DVD burner, software capable of burning ISO files, and a blank DVD.
But before we open the store to the public, we will be offering free downloads of review copies to a limited number of bloggers who plan on publishing reviews of the film. If you’re interested in reviewing Indoctrinate U, please send your name (or online pseudonym), the name of your site, the site’s URL, and the e-mail address where you’d prefer to be contacted to this e-mail address:
reviews (at) indoctrinate-u (dot) com
When our online store launches, this offer will expire, so if you’re interested, e-mail us soon!
Oh yeah, non-blogger media folks are welcome, too.
Was reading your most recent post about campaign finance reform and how it relates to private citizens generating “issue oriented” content. This is such a slippery slope, on all sides, that I think the judges and congress should be more worried about than us as private citizens. These guys are still thinking about content distribution and ad placement in terms of quaint methods they can wrap their heads around. How do they plan to apply such decisions to web distribution? What about hybrids like CurrentTV? What about YouTube on your TV via AppleTV? Do people have to give equal time on their blogs and social networks? Podcasts? RSS feeds? Twitter?
Further, as an internet marketer I am really curious to see how they ever plan on extending their reach into the numerous platforms of ad distribution: paid search, organic search, banners, email, pay for post, mobile marketing, embedded ads in video, viral marketing, guerrilla marketing, flash mobs... I could go on for hours, and that’s the point. Are these guys who think of the internet in terms of tubes really ready to delve into that world? They are ill equipped to wade into the pool beyond radio, TV and print, and quite frankly, two of those three are all but off the table for most promotional purposes and TV is quickly becoming unattractive as other methods offer vastly superior ROI. They are making bad decisions that won’t even apply to reality by the time they finally pass anything legislatively.
You can’t control political speech and advertising with today’s technology any more than you can lasso the moon. Whether it should be done or not becomes a moot point then.
I agree that political speech will be harder to regulate as media becomes more fractured and decentralized. But I wish I thought that meant politicians and bureaucrats wouldn’t try. If anything, the seeming chaos of the cacophony of individual voices in online media will probably lead some people to start arguing for tighter controls on political speech.
So as long as speech regulations are pitched as something else—such as campaign finance reform—it ends up getting supported by people who don’t pay much attention to politics but casually believe campaign finance needs reforming. And unfortunately, people have a tendency to care a lot less about free speech when it isn’t theirs being stifled.
It is interesting that, by and large, the editorial pages of the nation’s newspapers supported the McCain/Feingold political speech limitation bill. The fact that the legislation limited the speech of other private citizens—and not newspaper editorial writers—probably didn’t hurt. After all, in a world with less political speech, the power of a newspaper editorial writer is enhanced. Faced with a media environment where more people are getting news online and from independent voices, a cynic might say that newspapers saw campaign finance reform as the McCain/Feingold Endangered Editorialists’ Protection Act.
Being embedded in an old-media business, the ink-and-paper columnists might not have seen the regulations as a direct threat to their speech. But that’s only because they’re confusing their product—words and images—with the physical carrier of their product.
By encouraging the government to regulate political speech differently based on the employment status of the speaker and the medium in which the speech is conveyed, myopic editorialists have guaranteed that busybody bureaucrats will eventually try to tie down whatever medium those newspaperites flee to once the last inch of their sinking paper ship is finally dragged beneath the surface.
Whether they be political activists or not, if private citizens, like the folks who formed Citizens United, do not have the right band together to engage in political speech during certain times of the year, then the First Amendment is just a part-time right afforded to only part of the citizenry.
4 December 2007 >>
There’s a little scandal brewing within Wikipedia.
The free online encyclopedia editable by anyone prides itself on being a meritocracy. The site successfully harnessed the wisdom of crowds to build what’s probably the largest, most quickly-constructed body of knowledge ever assembled in human history. Not bad for something that didn’t even exist when the decade began.
For much of its content, the Wikipedia model seems to work pretty well. Easily-verifiable facts like names, places and dates tend to be rendered accurately. And when they’re not, they’re easy to fix. With millions of eyeballs scanning everything, errors can be caught quickly.
But when the topic is a subject of debate or controversy, the natural human tendency to want to convince others of one’s rightness can lead to some nasty behavior. And when that happens in Wikiland, not only is the quality of the product degraded, so is the trust people place in the collaborative editing process.
A spat between contributors that recently became public demonstrated this weakness in the Wikipedia model, The Register reports (in a somewhat sensationalist tone):
Controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia’s core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site’s top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.
Many suspected that such a list was in use, as the Wikipedia “ruling clique” grew increasingly concerned with banning editors for the most petty of reasons. But now that the list’s existence is confirmed, the rank and file are on the verge of revolt.
Revealed after an uber-admin called “Durova” used it in an attempt to enforce the quixotic ban of a longtime contributor, this secret mailing list seems to undermine the site’s famously egalitarian ethos. At the very least, the list allows the ruling clique to push its agenda without scrutiny from the community at large. But clearly, it has also been used to silence the voice of at least one person who was merely trying to improve the encyclopedia’s content.
“I’ve never seen the Wikipedia community as angry as they are with this one,” says Charles Ainsworth, a Japan-based editor who’s contributed more feature articles to the site than all but six other writers. “I think there was more hidden anger and frustration with the ‘ruling clique’ than I thought and Durova’s heavy-handed action and arrogant refusal to take sufficient accountability for it has released all of it into the open.”
Kelly Martin, a former member of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, leaves no doubt that this sort of surreptitious communication has gone on for ages. “This particular list is new, but the strategy is old,” Martin told us via phone, from outside Chicago. “It’s certainly not consistent with the public principles of the site. But in reality, it’s standard practice.”
[...]
If you take Wikipedia as seriously as it takes itself, this is a huge problem. The site is ostensibly devoted to democratic consensus and the free exchange of ideas. But whether or not you believe in the holy law of Web 2.0, Wikipedia is tearing at the seams. Many of its core contributors are extremely unhappy about Durova’s ill-advised ban and the exposure of the secret mailing list, and some feel that the site’s well-being is seriously threatened.
In a post to Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales says that this whole incident was blown out of proportion. “I advise the world to relax a notch or two. A bad block was made for 75 minutes,” he says. “It was reversed and an apology given. There are things to be studied here about what went wrong and what could be done in the future, but wow, could we please do so with a lot less drama? A 75 minute block, even if made badly, is hardly worth all this drama. Let’s please love each other, love the project, and remember what we are here for.”
But he’s not admitting how deep this controversy goes. Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation came down hard on the editor who leaked Durova’s email. After it was posted to the public forum, the email was promptly “oversighted” - i.e. permanently removed. Then this rogue editor posted it to his personal talk page, and a Wikimedia Foundation member not only oversighted the email again, but temporarily banned the editor.
Then Jimbo swooped in with a personal rebuke. “You have caused too much harm to justify us putting up with this kind of behavior much longer,” he told the editor.
If there’s a flaw in the Wikipedia model, it isn’t that the site relies on the wisdom of crowds too much, it’s that the site’s highest-volume contributors and editors—the people who effectively run the place—could succumb to the gravitational pull of groupthink.
The problem is that it’s difficult to engineer a way to allow for group-driven creation of content while dispersing certain responsibilities and decision-making tasks among the masses. It’s impossible to create a system that’s completely open to everyone without getting overrun by malicious vandals, so it’s hard to see how the site could avoid issuing bans or using some other form of group-imposed censorship.
But, to whatever extent is possible, Wikipedia would be wise to avoid greater centralization of power. Otherwise, it could lead to problems that could cause Wikipedia’s well-earned goodwill is going to melt away just as quickly as it was built.
27 October 2007 @ 6:58AM >>
Matthew Sheffield of NewsBusters recently interviewed me on a wide range of topics. His extensive interview, the first in what will soon be a series on the website, has now been posted.
It is quite apparent from reading the transcript that I must have spoken with Sheffield after a few cups of coffee.
26 October 2007 @ 10:19AM >>
Tonight, in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Indoctrinate U begins a week-long run at the Oak Street Cinema on the east edge of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus.
Stanley Kurtz of National Review wonders if this is part of a media revolution:
Maybe you’ve heard about Indoctrinate U’s DC premiere. The crowd went wild. Now, if you live in or near the Twin Cities, you can go wild too. In association with the Minnesota Association of Scholars and the Tocqueville Center at the University of Minnesota, the Moving Picture Institute is going to be putting on a full week of screenings of Indoctrinate U. [...]
Now for the “global” implications. Think about it. Something very interesting is happening here. The producers of Indoctrinate U are promising to arrange local screenings in areas where enough people express interest at their website. And now they’re holding a local screening. The idea of a local screening tour for politically incorrect films could become the cinematic equivalent of the internet—a way around the mainstream Hollywood blockade. And with luck, strong local interest might even break the Hollywood blockade and prompt a distributor to actually offer Indoctrinate U in commercial theaters. So we may be looking at a genuine “media event,” in the best sense of that term.
22 August 2007 @ 9:12AM >>ExpertVoter.org implements a simple, but powerful idea: provide voters direct access to the YouTube statements of presidential candidates running for office.
The main page is arranged in a grid, with issues across the top and candidates down the side. Candidates are also grouped and color-coded by party.
To hear a candidate’s stance on a given issue, just click the thumbnail image in the appropriate box. To hear all the candidates speak about a particular issue, you can sequentially click down the column for that issue.
And unlike what you might find in the reportage of the establishment media, lesser-known candidates are included as well.
YouTube also has a page that is a good starting point to the candidates, but I find ExpertVoter’s layout provides a better overview with far fewer clicks. The site is a good example of how the Internet can do a better job at informing the electorate than the old media.
17 December 2006 @ 9:49AM >>
According to a government report, daily use of the Internet has become more common among Americans than newspaper reading.
13 December 2006 >>
Some thoughts on the future of newspapers from The Atlantic Monthly:
[T]op reporters and columnists at major newspapers are realizing (or will realize soon) that their fates are not necessarily tied to those of their employers. As portals and search engines and blogs increasingly allow readers to consume media without context or much branding, writers like Thomas Friedman will increasingly wonder what is the benefit of working for a newspaper—especially when the newspaper is burying his article behind a subscriber wall. It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists-like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.
So what should newspapers do? They could stop printing. It may happen eventually, or perhaps newsprint will find a financially sustainable market among the elite and elderly (or perhaps it will have a nostalgic vogue not unlike that of, say, heirloom tomatoes), but that’s not what I’m getting at. The current Web-publishing model that newspapers are using isn’t likely to become financially viable anytime soon. With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.
That, I’d venture, is how you start rethinking the newspaper business. Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms. To take but one example, Kelefa Sanneh is the pop-music critic for The New York Times. He is very likely the best music critic in the country, and certainly the best new Times music writer in years. Let’s say that Sanneh creates his own community around the music he likes. Or The Washington Post’s Dana Priest creates an interactive online universe around her intelligence reportage. With editorial oversight only for libel and factual accuracy, Sanneh or Priest are allowed to do whatever they want on their sites (while their mother ships pour their resources into marketing them). In Sanneh’s case, allow other people to write music reviews under the Times/Sanneh “brand.” In Priest’s case, turn the site into a clearinghouse for global intelligence information, rumors, conspiracy theories, and so forth (obligatory disclaimer: “The views of posters do not necessarily represent those of the Washington Post Company”). Go even further: incentivize the critics and reporters by allowing them to profit based on the popularity of their sites; make it worth their while to stick around.
[...]
Playing this logic out, the next task would be uniting the Sanneh or Priest site to the Times or Post whole. You could essentially self-syndicate, sending your regular Times or Post headlines to Sanneh’s and Priest’s sites, luring readers back to the mother ship while increasing the number of times each story is read. Indeed, the logic could be (and in some circles already is being) played out even further. What if you essentially exploded the central function of the newspaper and “microchunked” (to borrow a current term) the content, syndicating all of it to bloggers or other news sites in return for a share of any advertising revenue each site generates? The Associated Press has made this the centerpiece of its digital-age strategy: it recently signed a potentially breakthrough deal with Google, in which Google will pay the AP for access to its stories; and the AP has launched a broadband player that Web sites can use to access AP video content. Its content goes where the readers are, and the AP gets paid, no matter what. Remarkably, this most old-school of services is a lone bright spot in the MSM landscape. The AP’s revenues have increased from more than $593 million in 2003 to more than $654 million in 2005; its digital revenue grew at a rate of 66 percent from 2004 to 2006. Of course, the AP has always been a syndicator, so no conceptual leap of faith (indeed no leap whatsoever) was required to move the business from analog to digital.
5 December 2006 @ 8:32AM >>
Blogger Bill Rogio is embedded in Iraq:
While waiting to manifest on the flight to Fallujah, CNN played a news segment of President Bush announcing there would be no “graceful exit” from Iraq, and that we’d stay until the mission was complete. Two sergeants in the room cheered. Loudly. They then scoffed at the reports from Baghdad, and jeered the balcony reporting.
In nearly every conversation, the soldiers, Marines and contractors expressed they were upset with the coverage of the war in Iraq in general, and the public perception of the daily situation on the ground. The felt the media was there to sensationalize the news, and several stated some reporters were only interested in “blood and guts.” They freely admitted the obstacles in front of them in Iraq. Most recognized that while we are winning the war on the battlefield, albeit with difficulties in some areas, we are losing the information war. They felt the media had abandoned them.
During each conversation, I was left in the awkward situation of having to explain that while, yes, I am wearing a press badge, I’m not ‘one of them.’ I used descriptions like ‘independent journalist’ or ‘blogger’ in an attempt to separate myself from the pack.
What a terrible situation to be in, having to defend yourself because of your profession. I’ve always said that the hardest thing about embedding (besides leaving my family) is wearing the badge that says ‘PRESS.’ That hasn’t changed. I hide the badge whenever I can get away with it.
5 November 2006 >>
On Monday night (November 6th), I’ll be appearing on the Comcast show It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle. We’ll be discussing the upcoming election, including a bunch of Senate races I haven’t been following. The truth is out: political chat shows really do book people who don’t know what they’re talking about! (Hard to believe, I know.) Well, tomorrow’s my turn to be that guy, on Comcast CN8 throughout the northeast and mid-Atlantic states at 9PM ET.
And throughout election day on Tuesday, I’ll be helping Pajamas Media cover the Connecticut Senate race from Hartford and the headquarters of current Senator—and former Democrat—Joe Lieberman.
16 October 2006 @ 12:13PM >>
When readers of this site hear that an old media company is embracing virtual reality, it might conjure up memories of Dan Rather and some not-quite-real documents. But in this case, one of the oldest media companies in the world is breaking new ground by dedicating a full-time reporter to covering the economic happenings within a virtual universe called Second Life:
In preparing to open a Reuters bureau on a bustling island, Adam Pasick has been introducing himself to residents and interviewing entrepreneurs. After finishing such interviews, Mr. Pasick often levitates for a moment, then flies over buildings.
Mr. Pasick, a Reuters technology reporter who was formerly earthbound with the news agency, is heading up Reuters’ first virtual news bureau inside the online role-playing game Second Life. While many independent journalists and bloggers have published inside such virtual worlds, Reuters is the first established news agency to dispatch a full-time reporter to do so.
[...]
“The fact that it’s in a virtual world doesn’t change things as much as you’d think,” said Mr. Pasick, 30, a Michigan native based in London. “It’s not any different than when Reuters opens up a bureau in a part of the world that has a fast-growing economy that we weren’t in before. The laws of supply and demand hold true, it has a currency exchange, people open businesses and get paid for goods and services.”
Created by Linden Lab in San Francisco, Second Life is the closest thing to a parallel universe existing on the Internet. Akin to the original city-building game SimCity, Second Life is a virtual, three-dimensional world where users create and dress up characters, buy property and interact with other players.
More than 900,000 users have signed up to build homes, form neighborhoods and live out alternative versions of their lives in the 3D, computer-generated world. Players spend around US$350,000 a day on average, or a rate of $13 million a year. Usage is growing in rapid double-digit terms each month.
Players buy and sell goods and services using a virtual currency, known as Linden Dollars. An online marketplace allows users to convert the currency into real U.S. dollars, enabling users to earn real money from their activities.
Adam Pasick, a Reuters’ media correspondent based in London, will serve as the news organization’s first virtual bureau chief, using a personal avatar, or animated character, called “Adam Reuters,” in keeping with the game’s naming system.
“As strange as it might seem, it’s not that different from being a reporter in the real world,” Pasick said. “Once you get used to it — it becomes very much like the job I have been doing for years.”
Over the last month, I’ve been helping Reuters launch their presence in Second Life; I was brought in as an outside consultant and was responsible for much of the programming work. It’s been a fun gig, and has helped me fill the downtime while we work out distribution kinks with the upcoming film Indoctrinate U.
But what I found most intriguing is that an old-school company like Reuters would even consider embracing virtual reality, much less with this level of commitment. Ten years ago, such a move would likely have been met with derision by other establishment media companies. But covering online communities like Second Life makes sense: there’s real economic activity, and there are important issues to cover—such as how real-world laws will be applied to environments like Second Life.
It’s a sign of a changing world...both real and virtual.
4 May 2006 >>
Stuart Browning, one of my business partners in On The Fence Films, stopped by the May Day protest in San Francisco to gather some footage. He also noticed signs and banners from the various extremist groups that backed the protest, and wonders why the establishment media is glossing over the radical nature of the organizers.
El Uno de Mayo, his two-city report (which incorporates some of my footage from New York), is now available for free online viewing.
4 May 2006 >>
Earlier today, Power Line posted an in-depth video report of the May Day protests held around the country this past Monday. The effort was coordinated by documentary filmmaker Andrew Marcus, who edited and narrated the report
I shot some of the New York City footage, and contributed a few comments to the report via phone interview. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to dedicate enough time to creating a short video for Brain Terminal, but with the work on Indoctrinate U winding down this summer, I hope to be able to post some new videos of my own in the not-too-distant future.
2 May 2006 @ 4:07PM >>
Stuart Browning, one of my partners in On The Fence Films, took his video camera to the May Day protest in San Francisco yesterday. For now, he’s got a series of stills from the rally; in a few days, he’ll be posting a video covering multiple cities.
Also, documentarian Andrew Marcus leads a multi-city team in covering the protests in conjunction with PowerLine and Pajamas Media. He’s got a few scenes from the protests, and will also be following up with more footage later this week.
18 April 2006 >>
Independent online journalist Michael J. Totten took a recent trip to Kurdish Iraq with blogger Sean LaFreniere. Totten’s report is a fascinating read, and it is supplemented by many pictures—some of them quite eye-opening—of life in northern Iraq.
Combining the spirit of blogging with the economic model of public broadcasting—minus the taxpayer-funded subsidies—Totten is providing unique reports from around the middle east and financing it through reader contributions. I think his model represents the future of online reporting, and I hope it succeeds.
If you find his work valuable, please consider hitting the PayPal donation button at the end of his report.
In addition to providing video reports from established news sources, Power Line News Video is also soliciting contributions from independent videographers wishing to find distribution for their own work. Power Line, as one of the most-visited sites in the blog world, would undoubtedly provide an impressive platform for video reporters seeking a sizable audience.
27 March 2006 >>
Wired News reports that the Federal Election Commission has decided to treat online journalists no differently from those in print or broadcast media:
The decision means that bloggers and online publications will not be covered by provisions of the new election law. Internet bloggers and individuals will therefore be able to use the internet to attack or support federal candidates without running afoul of campaign spending and contribution limits.
“It’s a win, win, win,” Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub said, adding that the rule would satisfy concerns of campaigns, individuals and the internet community about whether the campaign finance law applies to online political activity.
[...]
FEC Chairman Michael E. Toner said the new rules give a “categorical and unqualified” exemption for all individual and group political activity on the internet, except for paid advertising.”
[...]
Bloggers would be entitled to the same exemption from the campaign finance law that newspapers and other traditional forms of media receive.
“There will be no second class citizens among members of the media,” Toner said.
8 March 2006 @ 12:46PM >>
London’s Daily Mailreports:
Surfing the Internet is now more popular than watching television, according to new figures.
On average, adults in Britain spend more time online at their computers - 41.5 days a year - than in front of the TV.
Government figures from the Office of National Statistics show that we spend just 37.5 days a year watching television.
It is believed to be the first time that using the Internet has overtaken what was traditionally seen as the nation’s favourite pastime.
Two-thirds of the survey respondents indicated that they spend an increasing amount of time online every year.
I suspect this trend is not limited to Britain, and it will be magnified as more people come online and as high-speed broadband connections become increasingly available.
This means that establishment media audiences will continue to become fragmented, and that there is a tremendous opportunity for distributing new content online. The traditional gatekeepers will find fewer and fewer people lining up at the gates.
