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January 13, 2009
Berkman’s Citizen Media Law Project has published a guide for bloggers, twitterers, and other citizen media folks on the rights and restrictions of those documenting the inauguration.
January 12, 2009
Jay Rosen explains beautifully both why the media maintains its limited range of acceptable views and what’s shifted. Jay gives us a great frame for understanding this, drawing on Daniel Hallin‘s work.
January 10, 2009
Feeling enabled by magcloud — a you-do-the-content-and-we’ll-do-the-rest service — Shannon Clark is thinking of starting a magazine. An actual magazine, with articles and pages and possibly staples. It’ll be on things he finds interesting and aims at being high-quality stuff with a relatively long shelf life.
This is the sort of thing that shouldn’t work, and then on rare occasions does.
January 5, 2009
Not that Doc needs validation by the mainstream media, but I still think it’s pretty cool that the Washington Post has snagged one of his photos off of Flickr to illustrate their article about Dean Elena Kagan being selected as Obama’s Solictor General. (Of course that’s Jonathan Zittrain behind her.)
Dean Kagan is beloved at Harvard Law. Deservedly.
Habib Battah has an op-ed in Al Jazeera about the disparity between the American media coverage of the Israeli invasion and the Arab world’s. And there’s always Global Voices if you want to hear what bloggers in the region are saying.
December 29, 2008
Bill Kristol is affable. He’s a good guest on The Daily Show. But he’s been a disappointing addition to the NY Times roster of columnists.
For example, his second most recent contribution is vapid. It’s not just that it rambles so much that it achieves a Zen-like topical emptiness. When he alights for a moment on an actual issue, he’d rather be counter-intuitive than coherent. Here’s how it opens:
O.K., O.K. … you don’t have to. But consider this exchange with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”:
WALLACE: Did you really tell Senator Leahy, bleep yourself?
CHENEY: I did.
WALLACE: Any qualms, or second thoughts, or embarrassment?
CHENEY: No, I thought he merited it at the time. (Laughter.) And we’ve since, I think, patched over that wound and we’re civil to one another now.
No spin. No doubletalk. A cogent defense of his action — and one that shows a well-considered sense of justice. (“I thought he merited it.”) Indeed, if justice is seeking to give each his due, one might say that Dick Cheney aspires to being a just man. And a thoughtful one, because he knows that justice is sometimes too harsh, and should be tempered by civility.
Does that last sentence make sense given that Cheney is refusing to apologize for his lack of civility? Does Kristol really want to stand by a vice president telling a senator to go fuck himself? If I were the NY Times, I’d worry about a columnist that left readers wondering if he’s mistakenly left out a “not.”
His latest column is a series of things he likes about the planned inauguration. It’s nice to hear this sort of bipartisanship, but the column is really a series of cheap shots at liberals and Obama. And that’d be ok if the cheap shots were amusing or particularly insightful. Instead, it comes off as passive-aggressive and lazy.
It’s not enough for a columnist to define himself as out of place on the NY Times op-ed page. We need some content, some argument, something worth disagreeing with. Surely the Times can find a conservative columnist who gives a damn.
[Later] Call me fair and balanced, but here’s Glenn Greenwald‘s appropriately scathing criticism of David Gregory’s softball questioning of the Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on “Meet the Press” this Sunday. Glenn doesn’t bother pointing out that Gregory went on to question David Axelrod mainly about Gov. Blago and Pastor Wright, and then remembered there was this little problem with the economy that was maybe worth mentioning.
December 26, 2008
December 23, 2008
On the Radio Berkman podcast this week, Persephone Miel, lead author on the Media Re:Public paper series, talks about what’s missing from the new journalism landscape. Then, Patricia Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media, discusses the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. Finally, Jessica Clark, Director of the Future of Public Media Project gives her top five predictions for digital media in 2009. All in 25 minutes.
Radio Berkman will be back next year, thanks to Daniel Jones, the producer, who has been doing a fantastic job with it.
The national media syndicate GateHouse Media owns 125 local newspapers in Massachusetts, and runs the Wicked Local local news sites. The Boston Globe is not part of GateHouse Media. The Globe has started its own local sites, such as this one in Newton, MA. The Globe’s local sites run lots of news from the Globe, but they also aggregate local headlines from other sources, including from GateHouse. Those headlines link to the original sites, of course.
So, GateHouse now has sued the Globe‘s parent for copyright and trademark infringement, because GateHouse would prefer that no one know about or care about what it writes.
GateHouse is apparently unsure of how this whole Web thang works. Plus, the company’s lawyers skipped class the day Fair Use was discussed. Bad combination. Bad for GateHouse. Bad for the Web.
By the way, the title of this post is the headline from the Newton Tab, a GateHouse publication.
PS: There’s some feisty coverage of this in Cape Cod Today.
Later: Dan Gillmor raises good points, unsurprisingly. He usefully complicates the issue.
Later: Berkman’s Citizen Media Law Project has written up some preliminary thoughts. These are some topnotch lawyers and legal writers, so that’s the pond in which you’ll want to do your initial dives.
December 18, 2008
The Berkman Center’s Media Re:Public project assessing the state of the media (old school and citizen/participatory) is now out. (The papers are here.)
The report points to six issues, which I’m paraphrasing rather crudely:
1. Traditional media are scaling back their reporting because they’re going broke.
2. Their webby equivalents are not replacing all their functions.
3. Online news sources are not uniformly reliable, and not everyone knows that.
4. Not everyone is online anyway.
5. Some of the functions not being replaced online are really important, but we don’t yet have good business models for them.
6. We don’t have good data about what’s really going on.
This status report tries to bring some empiricism to the cheerleading (guilt as charged). It also pairs up nicely with a 2005 report about a Berkman conference that brought bloggers and mainstream journalists together for 1.5 days of frank discussions.
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