Slashdot Mirror
Who Controls The Linux Media ?
Paul Emms asks "I run LinuxLinks.com - a Linux portal and recently we added a personalised calendar service to our Web site. We submitted an article to LinuxToday (owned by internet.com) and it was published only to be pulled almost immediately. The reason given was that Web site enhancements are no longer news. But wait a minute, this sort of thing has made the news before. LinuxStart announced a similar calendar service, and who owns LinuxStart? Why internet.com of course." You have to admit, that's a pretty good reason to start asking questions...
"This opens up a number of questions about how we judge the news we read. Linux is becoming big business and there are vested interests. Web sites are merging and being taken over by large conglomerates. Who determines the impartiality of the news we read ? Who determines what is news and what is advertising ?
LinuxToday is one of the major daily Linux newsites and they determine that enhancements to major Linux Web sites like LinuxLinks is not important. But LinuxLinks is independent - it
isn't owned by internet.com and it isn't owned by VA Linux. Is it, and sites like it, being penalised because they don't have a monopoly in the Linux media ? And is this really in the spirit of the Linux movement ?
Paul Emms
pwe@firstlinux.com"
Hm, linuxlinks is href'ed, linuxstart is not. Are your motives real? Or are you just begging for some hits?
-- Rogier
What I think we should have here before we can even start reacting is a reply by either Linuxtoday or internet.com I am not wanting to see another witchhunt here.
Use Adsense for Charity
Sorry but I do not see a problem anywhere. One company (internet.com) is using its news site to promote their portal. Why is that wrong?
Just because it is happening in Linux now which is Free Software? Because your motives don't seem so pure to me. They want money, and so do you.
I think you need to understand the difference between Linux as a business and Linux as a free operating system. If you were developping your own open source project, and contributing to the community you would get all the publicity you needed (and deserved depending on the quality of your product). If you want to make money out of this, then the same business rules as everywhere else apply.
What he's really talking about is business motivted censorship. If a media controlled site posts a similar announcement about their own site, but deliberately yanks his, then there is a serious problem. It would be the same if Slashdot deleted all references to http://www.kuro5hin.org/ from postings here. Kinda the same tactics that the boys in Redmond use. So don't blow the guy off - let's see if his claim has validity and if it does, encourage internet.com to behave better.
What if the Hokey Pokey _is_ what it's all about?
there's a reason why the linux media exists: because "mainstream" publishing ignored linux and other free software. linux media companies/groups/organisations grew out of that in an effort to educate people on what their other choices were.
and just as we, in our roles in the tech industry, should not forget the companies and people that gave us the choices that linux, freebsd, gnu, x, apache, etc give us those magazines should remember the frustrations involved in having to start an entire side industry just to get free software noticed.
in other words we should reward those that play fair, and companies should market their integrity.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
A few weeks ago, Katz put up an essay on Open Media, which got promptly dissed. However, in situations like this, there is something to be said for an "open" media area where control of the stories posted is only done by the users, with minor content checking by moderators (so that we don't get fake news stories, etc). Freshmeat is a great example of this, though this is not 'news' as most think.
Could a similar site be done in the vien of Freshmeat, but with news? Maybe. Obviously, you would need a select few moderators that nix stories that don't belong there ("Look at my hot new pr0n site!"). Since it would be real-time, it would be necessary to have some language-check program on submissions to see if a similar article had not already been posted. It could be done, but would take some good behind-the-scenes programming.
Then comes the matter of associating it with being a "linux news" site. Slashdot did not force it's reputation on high level magazines, but itstead it was earned that by word-of-mouth. A site described above could also earn it's way by the same approach: if the site people create it well and make it work, then it too will become a linux news site by word of mouth. And then we won't have to worry about large corporate news sites failing to work for us.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
Anyway, this looks like a simple case of a company deciding not to promote a competing service. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. After all, if I were making widgets, would I really announce it on my web site when some competitor comes along and starts making widgets?
Now if I've missed something here, please let me know...
---
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Is anyone else annoyed by the big Internet.com "network"? It seems that they are going around and buying every single worthwhile and half-worthwhile website out there? After the site is acquired, it becomes slower than it was before, because they fill it with ads and links to their other sites.
During the last year, this has happened to many of the sites I frequent. I'm getting really bugged, and a even a little scared. This post on Slashdot just gives me another reason to be so.
- TheCounter was an excellent counter service. They had a website with two banner ads on each page, and a nice clean layout. The counters they provided loaded quickly and reliably. After having been acquired, the website was redone to something that makes my eyes hurt, and the counters started either taking ages to load, or failing to load at all. Their solution? Create a new account so that it exists on our new server.
- No major changes yet at LinuxApps, except for all the links and ads for the other Internet.com sites. However, the same problem as the one listed in this post arises. Would a post about Freshmeat on LinuxNewbie be pulled because Internet.com owns LinuxApps, which is similar to Freshmeat? This is, apparently, what happened in this case.
- BrowserWatch, LinuxNewbie, PHPBuilder, and a lot of other sites I frequent have all been bought by Internet.com. There haven't been major changes on them yet, besides all the annoying links and logos, but this post gives me more reason to be paranoid.
I guess a few companies are currently trying to capture as much eyeballs on the web as possible to have more control, in order to be able to continue to capture more and more eyeballs. Sounds familiar? I think that the point here (if there is any) that all corporations are the same, be it meatspace or here. There is absolutely no reason to trust them, and they must be watched and kept in check.--
Hardly paranoia - in fact, speaking as someone who used to work in big media (part of the Murdoch empire), it sounds pretty plausible.
Real world example? Well, there's the real and intimate connection between a local tech rag's advertising income and editorial inches. Or the way that the TV listings for local papers show plenty of detail on the pay TV channels owned by the publisher of the paper, but little on free-to-air ones outside his empire. All fair game in the modern newsroom, of course, but it's worth paying attention to these things when assessing the creditbility of what you see.
More problematic is what you never get to see. Reportage on the CIA role in the murderous coup in Chile in 1973 isn't too big in the USA, I understand. So people in .us don't even know what questions to ask on that score. And I doubt the local current affairs progamme sponsored by an arm of GM would give too much covereage to any corporate malfeasance in that company.
So, the latest "web site calendar" story was deemed to not be news any more.
You then moan that a similar story had been published before.
Yes. In July. LAST YEAR.
A year ago, such things may have been news. They certainly aren't now.
If the "rival" story had been published in the same month, in replacement to yours, then you'd have a point. You don't have one *at all* in this situation.
1) Is it running GPL'd software?
2) Does it do something different(ly)?
If either answer is "No", it's justifiable in my mind that Linux Today consider it 'not newsworthy'.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
Of course, we don't know in THIS PARTICULAR CASE whether or not this guy is just whinging (because it really wasn't news) or whether it was "news" that was removed because it was about a competitor. But in general, the issue raised is a serious one. If a news outlet pulls a legitimate story because it is not in the commercial interests of the company that owns it to keep the story up, then that company is no longer providing a news service and can no longer be trusted by the user. Those of us who come from countries with strong public service broadcasting traditions probably have less patience with this kind of commercially driven bias than do many Americans - who seem to take it for granted. Does this guy have a right to have his story up? No. Do we have the right to read that story on this news services website? No. But if the story is legit and it is pulled or ignored, the news service no longer has the right to call itself a news service. It has certainly changed my perception, slightly, of Linux Today - because they actually PULLED it.... Great slogan for linux init - Open the code, close the media.... If it is bad if MSNBC does it , it sure as hell is if LinuxToday does it.
Dan Gillmor has been addressing the question of trust in his weblog over the past couple of days. Of what I have read there, one thing in particular seems to ring true. When information is disseminated by or on behalf of a corporation, it seems to go through a corporate amorality filter. After it has been through this process, it will only contain that aspect of the overall picture which the corporation wishes to present. In the case of this particular complaint, the filter may have judged, "this kind of thing is not newsworthy in its own right, and it does not promote our own ends: therefore it is rejected." Is it too cynical to suppose that self-interest plays a part in the filtering process of an amoral corporation?
In many cases, the truthfulness of the filtered information is not a big issue. Indeed, the corporate amorality filter does not really have a clear concept of true and false, but of spin. Everything is phrased so that it has the right spin. Certainly the filter shies clear of stuff that might get them embroiled in litigation for slander, libel, or defamation (etc), but the simplistic concepts of true and false don't really factor into the equation. When Microsoft claims that its innovation is good for the industry and consumers, there's nothing in that statement which they can get into legal trouble over, and hence no reason not to make the statement, given that it is the view they wish to present. Whether or not it is true by any measure is not the issue: the point is that it's a legally allowable statement that they wish to be perceived as true.
So what do you do? You get cynical, but not too cynical. You have to assume that all the information you get has gone through some kind of filter. Even when Slashdot wasn't a corporate entity, all the information still went through the Taco Filter. You have to make allowances for where the information is coming from. In a very few cases, you will find people that have a dedication to frank and open honesty -- people who do have a notion of true and false instead of just spin, and these are valuable. You still have to take the filter into account, but to a substantially smaller degree.
So where can the Linux community get its news from? The simple answer is that we always need more than one source, simply so we can average out the effect of the various filters. Slashdot, for example, gives me a fairly rich range of stories to pick from, but I know for sure (based on the submissions that I've had rejected) that its filter is not ideal to my needs. And Slashdot does seem to have the advantage of an open comment system that, although noisy, doesn't seem to have been abused by thems that could do so if they wanted to.
Short version: the price of reliable news is eternal vigilance.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
"The reason given was that website enhancements are no longer news."
The Linuxstart news post is dated July last year. Thats a YEAR AGO.
obDisclaimer: I don't represent internet.com or LinuxToday. Anyone who says I tried is full of it.
I post to LinuxToday on a daily basis (my user name is "mhall"), and I write for LinuxPlanet (you can also l ook at my article history. My status in both relationships is that of a freelancer ("independent contractor").
There is a policy against announcing new site launches. I don't know when it was enacted because I'm fairly new to LinuxToday. I can say, however, that we routinely reject new site announcements. If one gets posted, it was a mistake.
There's another side of the coin, though, and one which the person posting the initial question could have followed: part of the LinuxToday "family" is the site LinuxPR, which allows anyone with a Linux-related business or site to join at no cost.
By signing up for LinuxPR, anyone posting a Linux-related press release (new product announcement, conference, or, most important to this case, site launch) gets their press release posted not only on the main page of LinuxPR, but on the front page of LinuxToday. Press releases are posted on a frequent basis as we're able. My own personal habit is to look in on the press releases several times an hour while I'm posting stories. I even take the step of correcting bad URL's and cleaning up some of the more egregious grammar problems.
Second, sites doing more than just announcing their existence are always welcome to use the LinuxToday contribute form.
Spend a few minutes looking at LinuxToday, please. Where do the stories come from? They come from other sites. How much of each story do we carry before pointing the reader to the rest of it? Seldom more than three or four paragraphs. When we have a reciprocal agreement with an organization like VNUNet or when the story is run by another internet.com site that isn't in the Linux channel we'll run the whole thing (which, when you think about it, is actually limiting the number of banners the internet.com site is going to move.) If anything, LinuxToday provides a means by which some smaller Linux-related sites can get more traffic than they might have before we thoughtfully provided a link to their story along with a few paragraphs of "teaser" to get the reader's curiosity up.
If LinuxToday were following an "anti-other-Linux-sites" policy, it would soon dry up and blow away. The strength of the site is the near-constant flow of news from around (and outside) the Linux community.
Finally, (and because this is the part most people will feel the most comfortable ignoring, because I'm talking about my client):
Despite several months of working on LinuxToday, I have never felt particularly "watched over" by internet.com. The other editors on the site and its primary programmer are all Linux enthusiasts who are interested in providing a good service to the Linux community. I've never knowingly withheld a story for any reason other than the fact we've already covered it ad nauseum or that it should be submitted as a press release because it's nothing more than an attempt to sell something (including eyeballs).
When I first threw in my lot with LinuxToday and LinuxPlanet, I had some concerns about the nature of the entity that owned them. My own roots in Linux go back over four years, and I've been a UNIX enthusiast for more than twice that time. I've contributed documentation to a major open free software product under the copyleft. I love Linux, and I love the community surrounding it. I get up each day at 6 a.m. to start posting on LinuxToday, and my thoughts are not to how well the money's flowing that day, but how much information is being moved to readers. When I set fingers to keyboard for a story on LinuxPlanet, it isn't because I'm thrilled at the prospect of creating revenue, it's because I hope I can help people make decisions, or inform them in some way. The people I work with (who are in a more durable relationship with internet.com than I) have shown the same instincts and concern for the Linux community.
There may be a site worthy of paranoia and suspicion, but I don't think LinuxToday is it.
Though it should not require reiteration, I'll note once more that I don't speak for any of the entities mentioned in this post besides myself. I'm just a freelancer.
Kind regards,
Michael
------------
Michael Hall
Charlottesville, Virginia
Michael Hall
mph.puddingbowl.org
All logged in users can look in the story queue, and vote if it should be posted or not.
It's working fairly well at the moment, although there is occasionally a shortage of discussion on stories.
You can also make editorial comments when you are voteing, which are separate to the "content comments"
if LinuxToday is one of the major daily Linux newsites it has an obligation to uphold its journalistic integrity!
that means that the editors at all times must be independent of management and business interests.
that i think is one of the most basic principle of any news media. at least it is in the printed news media.
i have no idea and don't really care whether or not LinuxLinks.com is newsworthy, but i am greatly disappointed to find anybody argueing that it is alright for a news media to be biased in its selection of news.
I just cant resist getting in on this one.
;-)
Let's see - first Dan Rather. As I recall, it was Dan Rather that tried to jump on then candidate/VP George Bush. In the negotiations to get Bush to show up for the interview it had been agreed that Rather wouldn't cover questions about Bush's involvement, if any, in Iran/Contra. Well - Rather low-balled him. Gorge came right back with questions about why Rather had a hissy fit and caused several minutes of dead air time
Mr Rather is no Uncle Walter.
As for the prediliction of the US press to soft ball news about the Democratic party. Hmmm - first comes to mind them sitting on an interview of someone accusing the Pres of being a rapist. NBC sat on this interview for almost a YEAR, until way AFTER the impeachment hearings went away. Then they soft-peddled when they finally did air it. There are other examples...but there is no point in going there in this post.
I'd say the original poster has asked a reasonable question. Maybe linuxtoday needs to "review" their editorial policies or maybe I might have to go some place else...there is always lwn and freshmeat.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
is that when the LinuxStart calendar item ran in JULY 1999, neither LinuxStart nor LinuxToday was owned by internet.com. At the time the supposed conspiracy occurred, LinuxStart was owned by Victor Goodman and LinuxToday was owned by Dave Whitinger and Dwight Johnson. It would have been rather impossible for a conspiracy to occur when the two sites were under different ownership. ;)
Slashdot did not force it's reputation on high level magazines, but itstead it was earned that by word-of-mouth.
;-)
kind of like the term "hacker" has become derogatory now-a-days. I now try to refrane from calling myself a hacker because people automatically assume "wow - you're some script kiddie who breaks into innocent people's computers." - I reply "no...you're thinking of a cracker" and the conversation deteriorates from there. The term has even made it into webster's dictionary. Something i'm not too happy about IMNSHO. Not that anyone who reads slashdot, or uses an OS coded by a European hacker should know or anything
As far as "news" sites are concerned. I'll say this. I was flamed greatly for my reply to the "oily penguin" story that was posted several days ago. My viewpoint wsa this - a site should stay focused and true to it's readership. That story, i felt, was not particularly well focused, at least in the slashdot sense. What does this have to do with sensoring stories on other sites? Simply this: Staying focused and true to your readership means not only refraining from posting stories that are "out of bounds" as far as the scope of your site, but additionally, posting stories that are in-bounds and timely.
Unfortunately for all of us, this usually means that the editors have to make a subjective judgement call in relation to what goes and what stays. In this case, however, i do think this was most likely just plain old sensorship. Let's get with the program kids. If you have a linux website dedicated to linux-based news - post linux based news - even if it's not in your interest. Or your readers will find someone else who will.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
The reason given was that Web site enhancements are no longer news.
now look when the last calender service was announced. A whopping year ago. Just maybe it is true what they said and they dont consider these things to be news anymore? Now I dont want to sound like a troll or something, but lets just think about the possibility they are telling the truth... this whole thing sounds a little bit like YACT (yet another conspiracy theory), imho.
nc.
I will not buy this software, it is scratched
From the Simpson's Stonecutter episode,
As sung by Rob Malda, CmdrTaco, and Hemos:
o/~ Who controls the linux media
Who keeps BSD down
We do! We do.
Who keeps sensibility off the maps
Who keeps the Mach under wraps
We do! We do.
Who holds back the Metallica's Lars
Who makes Jon Katz a star?
We do! We do.
Who robs geeks of their sight?
Who rigs every Linux-media event?
WE DO! WE DOOO.
o/~
-Gwizdak.
Does Burger King issue a press release when they start selling a new variation on the cheeseburger? Probably. Does it make CNN Headline News? Probably not. Why is that? Is AOL/Time Warner conspiring against Burger King in favor of McDonalds? Is there some secret corporate alliance? (There may be. So what?)
My point is, a new feature on a website is like a new variation on the cheeseburger. Great, now you can get barbecue sauce instead of ketchup. That's not going to catch my attention. And the job of a news source is to catch your attention long enough that your eyes go past the advertising.
I would have rejected an article about a feature addition to a website, too. Just as I don't pay much attention when a fast food restaurant adds another kind of sauce.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
Well, the publisher determines the impartiality of the news they publish. And you determine the impartiality of the publishers you read. If you feel it's not impartial, find another news source.
See #1. There is no ombudsman for the media. If fact, if there was, we wouldn't appreciate it that much.
I wasn't aware that inernet.com and VA Linux had monopolies in the Linux media. In fact, I wasn't aware that they were the same company. Did I miss the news about how internet.com merged with VA Linux and bought every other Linux media site? Better call the Justice Department
Yes. No. Maybe. Recently, there seem to be cracks forming in the armor of Linux solidarity. Is this a bad thing? Not at all. The goal of "world domination" seems to be universally agreed upon, but at what cost? Let's face it, there is no world domination without big business - it can't be a grass roots movement forever. Bringing linux to the world also means bringing the world to linux, and all of the corporate feasability and profitability issues that come with it. Only know do you understand
"Why is (sic) some people so god damn paranoid???"
Why are some people so god damn naive and trusting???
The media is biased, easily bought, and packed with propaganda and FUD, no matter what country you live in and no matter what socio-economic system you live under. You're daydreaming if you think otherwise.
Note how often Warner movies make the cover of Time magazine.
That would be linuxmediaarts.com