A couple of people have maintained that Google has the "right" to be unfair, as if that's the issue here. It isn't.
First, there's a public trust that goes with being the No. 1 company in any media field. As I wrote two years ago in a story that praised Google, the public is drawn to Google because it is fair, aboveboard, and won't accept secret payments for keyword searches and other payola that's now routine in the search industry. Google is holding itself out as an honest search company ("do no evil").
Second, the rights issue is irrelevant. Google News itself says it's trying to be fair and balanced, and if it isn't, it has to go back and look at its algorithms (that's what Google News' chief scientist told me this morning).
They're trying to get it right. Now they just have to figure out how to get there.
Actually, Google told me (I'm the article's author) that Google News contains NO blogs.
The only true blog I've seen on there has been the Daily Kos.
Sites like Michnews.com, Chronwatch.com, Mensnewsdaily.com and Useless-knowledge.org aren't really blogs, they're niche news outlets operated by one or two people, and they've won success on Google precisely because they've stayed away from the blog format, which Google continues to largely avoid.
While I disagree with most everything Valenti said, his views are widely shared in the content community, and I would expect his successor to follow in his footsteps.
Valenti would undoubtedly respond to the unfortunate theft of your DVD player and DVDs this way: why should DVDs be treated any differently than other physical items that the burglar might have taken: a wallet, a purse, a jacket in the back seat? you wouldn't have the right to go out and replace those items except by paying for them again.
That's not my view -- I wouldn't see anything wrong with downloading DVD movies or CDs that had been stolen from me -- but certainly there are a lot of people who would take the opposite view.
Correct, it will apply only to will apply only to digital terrestrial stations -- at this point. But once adopted, it would be a simple matter to go back to the FCC and argue that it should also apply to streaming Webcasts or satellite radio as well.
They're starting with all the AM and FM stations because that's where the money is.
Those Cary Sherman and Gary Shapiro letters are getting so much traffic that P2Pnet has posted them here and here, and run a longer version of my article here.
>I doubt digital terrestrial radio will take off, same way that digital terrestrial television has not taken off...
The technology research firm In-Stat/MDR forecasts 1 million digital receivers will be sold by the end of 2006, and it will take more than a decade for digital to surpass analog radio broadcasts.
We're seeing the same thing with DTV: slow adoption at the outset, and then a large uptake.
The point is, this will take a long time to happen. But when digital radio becomes widespread in 10-15 years, they'll start phasing out analog radio, just as they plan to sunset analog television broadcasts sometime after 2010. And we'll be stuck with the new rules of the new regime... except for those clever enough to (illegally) circumvent them.
- Although RCA is the manufacturer of this Hollywood movie filtering technology, they had nothing to do with creating it. They're licensing it from ClearPlay, which has been in the DVD filtering biz since 2000.
- None of this has to do with fair use or derivative works (despite what Hollywood's attorneys may claim). The original DVD doesn't change; the only thing that varies is the individual viewing experience. That's the critical difference here. Hollywood shouldn't be able to control how you watch movies in the privacy of your own home.
- The Directors Guild is a lot more ticked off about this than the studios are. For the studios, it just offers another revenue stream, particularly from conservative Christians who don't want their kids watching movies laced with profanities and sexual innuendo. The directors are apoplectic about this, though, and they're still in litigation against ClearPlay.
- Europe has a tradition of "moral rights" where artists can control their works after a sale. But there's no such tradition in the U.S. See Drew Clark's article in Slate on the subject.
- More software DVD players are on the way from the parent company of TVGuardian. They'll be in Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Sears, Circuit City and dozens of other outlets within two months.
I wrote an article on this for Business 2.0 a couple of months ago, but they haven't run it yet. I'm also writing about this for a book I'm writing on the digital media revolution.
My view of all this? Directors, producers, and other traditional power centers need to acknowledge that their creative control does not extend into private living rooms. How we consume fluid digital media, how we interact with it and view it in private, should be solely our choice.
-- J.D. Lasica
A second review of 'Free Culture'
on
Free Culture
·
· Score: 1
I've just published a review of Lessig's Free Culture on my weblog here.
Here's the ending:
The giant of cyberlaw has a few prescriptions for this sad state of affairs. One is Creative Commons, the organization housed at Stanford that gives creators greater freedom over how to manage and share their digital handiworks. But a more fundamental solution lies in Lessig's call for Congress to revisit the very basis of copyright to shorten copyright terms and, importanty, to rewire its fundamentals so that everything on the Internet does not automatically fall into the regulatory black hole governed by copyright law. Lessig suggests (as others have done) remixing the law so that copyright comes into play not when someone makes a copy of something for personal use but only when someone is engaged in the true piracy of profiteering.
His final suggestion is one of his best: Fire lots of lawyers.
I've had a copy of 321 Studios' DVD X Copy for the past year. It has a terrific set of safeguards to prevent movie piracy over the Internet, such as restricting you to make only *one* copy of any disc, embedding a digital identifier into the code to trace the origin of a pirated file, and being able to remotely turn off an account if an infringement is found to occur.
Jack Valenti, chairman and chief executive of the MPAA, hailed the ruling as "another step forward for the protection of copyrighted works and the livelihoods of the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the movie industry."
Valenti is wrong. Here is where the MPAA is shooting itself in the foot: Now, the only way to back up DVDs is to do so illegally. In the coming years, hundreds of thousands of people will turn to utilities like DVD Decrypter and other variants of the DeCSS program as the only alternative open to them.
321 Studios President Robert Moore said after the ruling that the company would distribute a DVD-copying product without a ripper, the software that allows consumers to break the copy-protection code on a DVD. He noted that rippers are available readily on the Internet
People are not going to give up their fair use right to up personal media just because the studios say that movies are the only medium that fair use doesn't cover. Now, instead of having a legal tool on the market that includes useful restrictions to prevent piracy, the studios have forced us into a world where only illegal programs with *no* such piracy safeguards will be the rule.
Really? All the evidence suggests just the opposite.
Was there a golden era before P2P came along in which the recording industry explored lots of creative new emerging musical forms, or took chances on lots of little-known groups that deserved wider attention? Certainly the labels' A&R departments have uncovered the occasional jewel. But the Internet -- as authorities such as Clay Shirky have previously pointed out -- has blasted into history the need for professional middlemen to act as gatekeepers or intermediaries to tell us what kinds of media we would supposedly enjoy. The music industry just happens to be the first domino to fall.
P2P won't kill the recording industry, but if it makes it smaller and more humble, that's a positive result. Of the 99 cents you pay for a song at iTunes, 70 cents goes to the label, 10 cents to the artist. Does that make sense?
We're in a time of disruptive transition. Music recording acts won't go away, they'll just use new business models that grow up around the Internet to get their sounds out to the public, and to get a larger share of the pie.
Let's remember: This is about the *artists,* not the record labels.
It's not important that you know who I am, although a two-second trip to Google would have netted you 23,000+ results. But I'd suggest that ideas are more important than bios.
If you're interested in the topic of participatory journalism, you could do worse than reading some of the articles I've written on the subject:
And if you haven't heard of the blogosphere, well, that's your loss.
I'm currently working on a book about the clampdown on people's digital rights by the entertainment industries, and hope to post a few chapters on/. for your input.
The word "objectivity" has become so loaded that I believe it's no longer useful in describing anything related to journalism. News folks who continue to cling to it risk alienating readers and viewers.
At the same time, that doesn't mean we need to toss balanced reporting out the door and embrace a totally subjective kind of reporting. I could give a sh*t what Tom Brokaw thinks about the latest bill passed by the House.
Instead, traditional news organizations should aspire to present fair, balanced, even-handed, comprehensive (but not "objective") news stories. And participatory journalism outfits should be free to present any sort of news it sees fit, whether balanced or subjective.
>As for participatory journalism...well, I expect journalists to make an effort at impartiality; to watch, not participate. A participant's account might be interesting, even informative, but it won't be journalism. Merely producing information is not jouranlism.
and:
>The primary reason to reject the notion that blog writing is journalism is that fact that blog writers lack editorial oversight, seldom obtain more than a single source to verify a story point (if they manage to obtain even a single source), and infuse their stories with entirely too much information about themselves.
I've been a journalist since 1977 (having worked at various metro dailies), so I probably know a little about newsrooms and journalism. My own view is that news people ought to move away from the idea that journalism is a mysterious craft that's confined only to a select priesthood -- a black art inaccessible to the masses. We forget the derivation of the word journalist: someone who keeps an account of day-to-day events.
In a newsroom, the op-ed columnists, travel writers and home decor writers all consider themselves journalists. Dan Gillmor, tech columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, is still a journalist when he posts directly to his weblog without his posting passing through an editorial filter first -- as he does every day.
Years ago I met Frank McCulloch, a legendary editor at the Sacramento Bee and Los Angeles Times who was Saigon bureau chief for Time magazine during the Vietnam War. An ink-stained member of the old guard, McCulloch believed that journalism was a simple thing. Find the right people. Ask the right questions. Write it up. "This ain't rocket science," he liked to tell people.
Exactly. Citizens are discovering how easy it can be to play reporter and publisher. To practice random acts of journalism, you don't need a big-league publication with a slick Web site behind you. All you need is a computer, an Internet connection, and an ability to perform some of the tricks of the trade: report what you observe, analyze events in a meaningful way, but most of all, just be fair and tell the truth, as you and your sources see it.
Bloggers can do that. Few bloggers fancy themselves journalists, but many acknowledge that their blogs take on some of the trappings of journalism: They take part in the editorial function of selecting newsworthy and interesting topics, they add analysis, insight and commentary, and occasionally they provide a first-person report about an event, a trend, a subject. Over time, bloggers build up a publishing track record, much as any news publication does when it starts out.
Now, is all blogging journalism? Not by a long shot. Nor is it likely that blogging will supplant traditional media or, as some have suggested, that blogging will drive news organizations out of business. When a major news event unfolds, a vast majority of readers will turn to traditional media sources for their news fix. But the story doesn't stop there. On almost any major story, the weblog community adds depth, analysis, alternative perspectives, foreign views, and occasionally first-person accounts that contravene reports in the mainstream press.
We should move beyond the increasingly stale debate of whether blogging is or isn't journalism and celebrate weblogs' place in the media ecosystem. Blogging and traditional journalism complement each other, intersect with each other, play off one another. And sometimes blogs actually do cross the line into real journalism.
The "media bean-counter" quote comes from another (related) OJR story I wrote, Niches of trust, which looked at three indie one-person news sites.
While I agree that indie news operations would cause dissonance from readers who want to stick to the familiar (if stale) old media brands, the fact that indie sites tend to offer niche news and subjective news might work in their favor over the long term.
Indymedia, for example, offers a subjective slant to political news (just as the increasingly popular Fox News does on the other side of the political spectrum). Whether it's Guerrilla News Network, The Car Place, Theme Park Insider, Consumer World or others, all such indie news sites offer solid personal journalism and community journalism often not found on institutional news sites beholden to commercial interests.
I don't see how user participation is "dangerous because common sense would dictate, somewhere along the line information will be misconstrued." That's where the Internet community's self-correction mechanism comes into play.
A conversation may be noisier, but it's much more fulfilling than a perpetual one-way lecture from the media.
Hi. I wrote the OJR series, so I'll dive in here and there.
>The article argues that blogging is not really journalism because there is no editor.
Actually, that's a view espoused by an editor at MSNBC.com -- and one that I disagree with. I agree with mjmalone that a lot of blogging is journalism. (My personal views on the subject weren't allowed into the story.) Here are some examples of open-source journalism:
- During the peace demonstrations in February, Lisa Rein took to the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, camcorder in hand, and taped video footage of the marchers and speakers, such as Rep. Barbara Lee, Harry Belafonte and antiwar activist Ron Kovic. She posted the video on her Weblog, complete with color commentary, providing much deeper coverage of the events than a viewer would get by watching the local news.
- At technology and media conferences, such as PopTech, South by Southwest and Digital Hollywood, bloggers in the audience have reported conference events in real time, posting photographs, speaker transcripts, and summaries and analysis of key points a full day before readers could see comparable stories in the daily newspaper.
- On July 16, 2003, blogger Andy Baio reported on the tragedy in which an elderly driver plowed through the Santa Monica Farmers Market just outside Baio's office window. He had been walking down that street 20 minutes before. Baio described "the dead and dying" lying in the street and relayed first-hand reports from office co-workers who were eyewitnesses. He also posted a map of the accident scene, laid out a detailed chronology of events, and pointed to media coverage and photographs of the bloody scene.
- On Super Bowl Sunday, a 22-year-old blogger in Los Angeles named Jessica braved the freezing cold to attend a televised outdoor concert by the British group Coldplay. She came home and blogged it, giving her take on the concert and reporting the band's play list. Like hundreds of others who watched the show and wanted to learn the names of the songs played, I turned to the Internet. I came up empty when I visited abc.com and coldplay.com. But hundreds of us found them (through Google) on Jessica's blog.
Jessica probably didn't know it, but she was committing a random act of journalism. And that's the real revolution here: In a world of micro-content delivered to niche audiences, more and more of the small tidbits of news that we encounter each day are being conveyed through personal media -- chiefly blogs.
I've heard it called it participatory journalism, open-source journalism, swarm journalism, distributed journalism, and journalism from the edges. By whatever name, it refers to individuals playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, sorting, analyzing and disseminating news and information -- a task once reserved almost exclusively to the traditional news media.
I included Slashdot, Kuro5hin and Metafilter as one of the categories because this, to me, is one of the most successful examples of using readers as creators, editors and fact-checkers.
-- JD Lasica
Re:Maybe he could explain what they actually do
on
EFF Chairman Interviewed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I can't think of a more critical time to support civil liberties and cyberliberties groups like the EFF in the face of the federal government's incursion into our privacy, corporations' surveillance of employees, and the entertainment industries' clampdown on our digital rights.
The EFF may not win every battle, but it's engaged and taking a leadership role in a number of legal struggles. I get two to three emails a week regarding bulletins, updates and legal developments. Not earthshaking, but at least they're in the trenches and on our side.
You mentioned Negativland's "U2." I know it's possible to find bootleg copies of this on the file-sharing networks, but remember what happened in the courts. Negativland was fined $90,000 and ordered to destroy all existing copies of "U2." Even though members of U2 said they had no problem with the release. (Island Records did, however.)
I attended the "Illegal Art" event at the Black Box in Oakland last night. It was eye-opening. Among the illegal works of art shown as "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," the 1987 psychological docudrama about the life and death of singer and anorexia victim Karen Carpenter. The film blended satire (eg, in its use of Barbie dolls to portray the characters) with historical perspective and surprising compassion. While it earned raves at film festivals, it was hit by a lawsuit by Richard Carpenter, who was portrayed in a negative light. Today, you can't see "Superstar" in theaters or find it in video stores.
Multiply that by several hundred other incidents and you'll begin to see the seriousness of the problem.
Actually, rhadamanthus' question is dead on, and I didn't see a reply from any of the feds -- I mean, august representatives of the Justice Dept.
In fact, this is not a theoretical question, but one that's already relevant to the existing marketplace. If you go into a video store today and buy or rent a DVD of "Birth of a Nation" -- which has been in the public domain since the 1930s -- you'll notice that the DVD is encrypted with digital rights management technology.
Which means that the public can't exercise its fair use rights. You can't copy it to your hard drive for reuse, remixing, recreation -- even though that's your right -- because it would be illegal to circumvent the encryption on the DVD under the DMCA.
Yet another reason to support a fair use bill of rights recently introduced in the House by Rep. Zoe Lofgren.
While I don't agree Slashdot is displaying journalism at its worst, I do agree that blocking LA Times, Chicago Tribune and an increasing number of other registration-required newspaper sites from your site is self-defeating and will only marginalize the relevance of / in the years ahead.
>if a newpaper site is asking for your phone number, that is way too much).
Um, every newspaper in the country requires your phone number. Why is it an invasion of privacy if the newspaper site (those folks in the office down the hall from the newsroom) does the same?
Slashdot Mirror
First, there's a public trust that goes with being the No. 1 company in any media field. As I wrote two years ago in a story that praised Google, the public is drawn to Google because it is fair, aboveboard, and won't accept secret payments for keyword searches and other payola that's now routine in the search industry. Google is holding itself out as an honest search company ("do no evil").
Second, the rights issue is irrelevant. Google News itself says it's trying to be fair and balanced, and if it isn't, it has to go back and look at its algorithms (that's what Google News' chief scientist told me this morning).
They're trying to get it right. Now they just have to figure out how to get there.
jd lasica (the article's author)
Actually, Google told me (I'm the article's author) that Google News contains NO blogs.
The only true blog I've seen on there has been the Daily Kos.
Sites like Michnews.com, Chronwatch.com, Mensnewsdaily.com and Useless-knowledge.org aren't really blogs, they're niche news outlets operated by one or two people, and they've won success on Google precisely because they've stayed away from the blog format, which Google continues to largely avoid.
jd lasica
While I disagree with most everything Valenti said, his views are widely shared in the content community, and I would expect his successor to follow in his footsteps.
Valenti would undoubtedly respond to the unfortunate theft of your DVD player and DVDs this way: why should DVDs be treated any differently than other physical items that the burglar might have taken: a wallet, a purse, a jacket in the back seat? you wouldn't have the right to go out and replace those items except by paying for them again.
That's not my view -- I wouldn't see anything wrong with downloading DVD movies or CDs that had been stolen from me -- but certainly there are a lot of people who would take the opposite view.
Not just Valenti.
- JD Lasica
They're starting with all the AM and FM stations because that's where the money is.
Those Cary Sherman and Gary Shapiro letters are getting so much traffic that P2Pnet has posted them here and here, and run a longer version of my article here.
The technology research firm In-Stat/MDR forecasts 1 million digital receivers will be sold by the end of 2006, and it will take more than a decade for digital to surpass analog radio broadcasts.
We're seeing the same thing with DTV: slow adoption at the outset, and then a large uptake.
The point is, this will take a long time to happen. But when digital radio becomes widespread in 10-15 years, they'll start phasing out analog radio, just as they plan to sunset analog television broadcasts sometime after 2010. And we'll be stuck with the new rules of the new regime ... except for those clever enough to (illegally) circumvent them.
-- jd lasica (started this topic)
- Although RCA is the manufacturer of this Hollywood movie filtering technology, they had nothing to do with creating it. They're licensing it from ClearPlay, which has been in the DVD filtering biz since 2000.
- None of this has to do with fair use or derivative works (despite what Hollywood's attorneys may claim). The original DVD doesn't change; the only thing that varies is the individual viewing experience. That's the critical difference here. Hollywood shouldn't be able to control how you watch movies in the privacy of your own home.
- The Directors Guild is a lot more ticked off about this than the studios are. For the studios, it just offers another revenue stream, particularly from conservative Christians who don't want their kids watching movies laced with profanities and sexual innuendo. The directors are apoplectic about this, though, and they're still in litigation against ClearPlay.
- Europe has a tradition of "moral rights" where artists can control their works after a sale. But there's no such tradition in the U.S. See Drew Clark's article in Slate on the subject.
- More software DVD players are on the way from the parent company of TVGuardian. They'll be in Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Sears, Circuit City and dozens of other outlets within two months.
I wrote an article on this for Business 2.0 a couple of months ago, but they haven't run it yet. I'm also writing about this for a book I'm writing on the digital media revolution.
My view of all this? Directors, producers, and other traditional power centers need to acknowledge that their creative control does not extend into private living rooms. How we consume fluid digital media, how we interact with it and view it in private, should be solely our choice. -- J.D. Lasica
I've had a copy of 321 Studios' DVD X Copy for the past year. It has a terrific set of safeguards to prevent movie piracy over the Internet, such as restricting you to make only *one* copy of any disc, embedding a digital identifier into the code to trace the origin of a pirated file, and being able to remotely turn off an account if an infringement is found to occur.
Jack Valenti, chairman and chief executive of the MPAA, hailed the ruling as "another step forward for the protection of copyrighted works and the livelihoods of the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the movie industry."
Valenti is wrong. Here is where the MPAA is shooting itself in the foot: Now, the only way to back up DVDs is to do so illegally. In the coming years, hundreds of thousands of people will turn to utilities like DVD Decrypter and other variants of the DeCSS program as the only alternative open to them.
321 Studios President Robert Moore said after the ruling that the company would distribute a DVD-copying product without a ripper, the software that allows consumers to break the copy-protection code on a DVD. He noted that rippers are available readily on the Internet
People are not going to give up their fair use right to up personal media just because the studios say that movies are the only medium that fair use doesn't cover. Now, instead of having a legal tool on the market that includes useful restrictions to prevent piracy, the studios have forced us into a world where only illegal programs with *no* such piracy safeguards will be the rule.
Anybody have the suicide hotline number?
Really? All the evidence suggests just the opposite.
Was there a golden era before P2P came along in which the recording industry explored lots of creative new emerging musical forms, or took chances on lots of little-known groups that deserved wider attention? Certainly the labels' A&R departments have uncovered the occasional jewel. But the Internet -- as authorities such as Clay Shirky have previously pointed out -- has blasted into history the need for professional middlemen to act as gatekeepers or intermediaries to tell us what kinds of media we would supposedly enjoy. The music industry just happens to be the first domino to fall.
P2P won't kill the recording industry, but if it makes it smaller and more humble, that's a positive result. Of the 99 cents you pay for a song at iTunes, 70 cents goes to the label, 10 cents to the artist. Does that make sense?
We're in a time of disruptive transition. Music recording acts won't go away, they'll just use new business models that grow up around the Internet to get their sounds out to the public, and to get a larger share of the pie.
Let's remember: This is about the *artists,* not the record labels.
If you're interested in the topic of participatory journalism, you could do worse than reading some of the articles I've written on the subject:
- Personal Broadcasting Opens Yet Another Front for Journalists
- Participatory Journalism Puts the Reader in the Driver's Seat
- What is Participatory Journalism?
- Niches of trust
- Independents day
- When webloggers commit journalism
- Personal storytelling
- Citizens as budding reporters and editors
And if you haven't heard of the blogosphere, well, that's your loss.
I'm currently working on a book about the clampdown on people's digital rights by the entertainment industries, and hope to post a few chapters on /. for your input.
You're a racist. And, naturally, an anonymous coward.
At the same time, that doesn't mean we need to toss balanced reporting out the door and embrace a totally subjective kind of reporting. I could give a sh*t what Tom Brokaw thinks about the latest bill passed by the House.
Instead, traditional news organizations should aspire to present fair, balanced, even-handed, comprehensive (but not "objective") news stories. And participatory journalism outfits should be free to present any sort of news it sees fit, whether balanced or subjective.
-- JD Lasica
>As for participatory journalism...well, I expect journalists to make an effort at impartiality; to watch, not participate. A participant's account might be interesting, even informative, but it won't be journalism. Merely producing information is not jouranlism.
and:
>The primary reason to reject the notion that blog writing is journalism is that fact that blog writers lack editorial oversight, seldom obtain more than a single source to verify a story point (if they manage to obtain even a single source), and infuse their stories with entirely too much information about themselves.
I've been a journalist since 1977 (having worked at various metro dailies), so I probably know a little about newsrooms and journalism. My own view is that news people ought to move away from the idea that journalism is a mysterious craft that's confined only to a select priesthood -- a black art inaccessible to the masses. We forget the derivation of the word journalist: someone who keeps an account of day-to-day events.
In a newsroom, the op-ed columnists, travel writers and home decor writers all consider themselves journalists. Dan Gillmor, tech columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, is still a journalist when he posts directly to his weblog without his posting passing through an editorial filter first -- as he does every day.
Years ago I met Frank McCulloch, a legendary editor at the Sacramento Bee and Los Angeles Times who was Saigon bureau chief for Time magazine during the Vietnam War. An ink-stained member of the old guard, McCulloch believed that journalism was a simple thing. Find the right people. Ask the right questions. Write it up. "This ain't rocket science," he liked to tell people.
Exactly. Citizens are discovering how easy it can be to play reporter and publisher. To practice random acts of journalism, you don't need a big-league publication with a slick Web site behind you. All you need is a computer, an Internet connection, and an ability to perform some of the tricks of the trade: report what you observe, analyze events in a meaningful way, but most of all, just be fair and tell the truth, as you and your sources see it.
Bloggers can do that. Few bloggers fancy themselves journalists, but many acknowledge that their blogs take on some of the trappings of journalism: They take part in the editorial function of selecting newsworthy and interesting topics, they add analysis, insight and commentary, and occasionally they provide a first-person report about an event, a trend, a subject. Over time, bloggers build up a publishing track record, much as any news publication does when it starts out.
Now, is all blogging journalism? Not by a long shot. Nor is it likely that blogging will supplant traditional media or, as some have suggested, that blogging will drive news organizations out of business. When a major news event unfolds, a vast majority of readers will turn to traditional media sources for their news fix. But the story doesn't stop there. On almost any major story, the weblog community adds depth, analysis, alternative perspectives, foreign views, and occasionally first-person accounts that contravene reports in the mainstream press.
We should move beyond the increasingly stale debate of whether blogging is or isn't journalism and celebrate weblogs' place in the media ecosystem. Blogging and traditional journalism complement each other, intersect with each other, play off one another. And sometimes blogs actually do cross the line into real journalism.
JD Lasica
While I agree that indie news operations would cause dissonance from readers who want to stick to the familiar (if stale) old media brands, the fact that indie sites tend to offer niche news and subjective news might work in their favor over the long term.
Indymedia, for example, offers a subjective slant to political news (just as the increasingly popular Fox News does on the other side of the political spectrum). Whether it's Guerrilla News Network, The Car Place, Theme Park Insider, Consumer World or others, all such indie news sites offer solid personal journalism and community journalism often not found on institutional news sites beholden to commercial interests.
I don't see how user participation is "dangerous because common sense would dictate, somewhere along the line information will be misconstrued." That's where the Internet community's self-correction mechanism comes into play.
A conversation may be noisier, but it's much more fulfilling than a perpetual one-way lecture from the media.
-- JD Lasica
>The article argues that blogging is not really journalism because there is no editor.
Actually, that's a view espoused by an editor at MSNBC.com -- and one that I disagree with. I agree with mjmalone that a lot of blogging is journalism. (My personal views on the subject weren't allowed into the story.) Here are some examples of open-source journalism:
- During the peace demonstrations in February, Lisa Rein took to the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, camcorder in hand, and taped video footage of the marchers and speakers, such as Rep. Barbara Lee, Harry Belafonte and antiwar activist Ron Kovic. She posted the video on her Weblog, complete with color commentary, providing much deeper coverage of the events than a viewer would get by watching the local news.
- At technology and media conferences, such as PopTech, South by Southwest and Digital Hollywood, bloggers in the audience have reported conference events in real time, posting photographs, speaker transcripts, and summaries and analysis of key points a full day before readers could see comparable stories in the daily newspaper.
- On July 16, 2003, blogger Andy Baio reported on the tragedy in which an elderly driver plowed through the Santa Monica Farmers Market just outside Baio's office window. He had been walking down that street 20 minutes before. Baio described "the dead and dying" lying in the street and relayed first-hand reports from office co-workers who were eyewitnesses. He also posted a map of the accident scene, laid out a detailed chronology of events, and pointed to media coverage and photographs of the bloody scene.
- On Super Bowl Sunday, a 22-year-old blogger in Los Angeles named Jessica braved the freezing cold to attend a televised outdoor concert by the British group Coldplay. She came home and blogged it, giving her take on the concert and reporting the band's play list. Like hundreds of others who watched the show and wanted to learn the names of the songs played, I turned to the Internet. I came up empty when I visited abc.com and coldplay.com. But hundreds of us found them (through Google) on Jessica's blog.
Jessica probably didn't know it, but she was committing a random act of journalism. And that's the real revolution here: In a world of micro-content delivered to niche audiences, more and more of the small tidbits of news that we encounter each day are being conveyed through personal media -- chiefly blogs.
I've heard it called it participatory journalism, open-source journalism, swarm journalism, distributed journalism, and journalism from the edges. By whatever name, it refers to individuals playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, sorting, analyzing and disseminating news and information -- a task once reserved almost exclusively to the traditional news media.
I included Slashdot, Kuro5hin and Metafilter as one of the categories because this, to me, is one of the most successful examples of using readers as creators, editors and fact-checkers.
-- JD Lasica
I can't think of a more critical time to support civil liberties and cyberliberties groups like the EFF in the face of the federal government's incursion into our privacy, corporations' surveillance of employees, and the entertainment industries' clampdown on our digital rights.
The EFF may not win every battle, but it's engaged and taking a leadership role in a number of legal struggles. I get two to three emails a week regarding bulletins, updates and legal developments. Not earthshaking, but at least they're in the trenches and on our side.
I attended the "Illegal Art" event at the Black Box in Oakland last night. It was eye-opening. Among the illegal works of art shown as "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," the 1987 psychological docudrama about the life and death of singer and anorexia victim Karen Carpenter. The film blended satire (eg, in its use of Barbie dolls to portray the characters) with historical perspective and surprising compassion. While it earned raves at film festivals, it was hit by a lawsuit by Richard Carpenter, who was portrayed in a negative light. Today, you can't see "Superstar" in theaters or find it in video stores.
Multiply that by several hundred other incidents and you'll begin to see the seriousness of the problem.
In fact, this is not a theoretical question, but one that's already relevant to the existing marketplace. If you go into a video store today and buy or rent a DVD of "Birth of a Nation" -- which has been in the public domain since the 1930s -- you'll notice that the DVD is encrypted with digital rights management technology.
Which means that the public can't exercise its fair use rights. You can't copy it to your hard drive for reuse, remixing, recreation -- even though that's your right -- because it would be illegal to circumvent the encryption on the DVD under the DMCA.
Yet another reason to support a fair use bill of rights recently introduced in the House by Rep. Zoe Lofgren.
--JD Lasica
While I don't agree Slashdot is displaying journalism at its worst, I do agree that blocking LA Times, Chicago Tribune and an increasing number of other registration-required newspaper sites from your site is self-defeating and will only marginalize the relevance of / in the years ahead.
The NY Times on the Web has required registration from their first day of publication in Jan. 1996.
Um, every newspaper in the country requires your phone number. Why is it an invasion of privacy if the newspaper site (those folks in the office down the hall from the newsroom) does the same?