We Always Needed Something New: Journalism Meets World

Benjamin Melançon
10:23 AM | bio | Comments: 4

Where will today's journalists will find tomorrow's jobs, Amy Gahran asks, and partially answers, in a recent Idealab post. She opened by quoting Alan Abbey, a commenter on her Poynter blog, discussing journalists' job losses: this downturn does feel similar to the widespread closures of coal mines and steel mills 25-30 years ago. What can we do with our outdated skills? If we in the media had covered the economic downturn and widespread closures of coal mines and steel mills 25-30 years ago with more care, respect, and investigation into how economic and political systems affect people, we would have... continued...

Topics: Government & Politics, Participation, Philosophy
Tagged: economic failure, inequality, journalism, organization, poverty, power, unfairness

Journalists Need to Update Stories Online

Benjamin Melançon
7:26 AM | bio | Comments: 3

For people without their own web site or blog, a newspaper article can become their primary identity online. Local news sites face this responsibility most often and most intensely. Every article or blog on the internet can become part of the permanent record, but the publisher doesn't control how and when people access this information- for the most part, search engines become the gatekeepers. However, news organizations can and should take responsibility for ensuring their piece of the permanent record provides their best understanding of reality. JD Lasica (also an Idealab blogger) quoted Terry Heaton riffing on a post by... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation, Technology
Tagged: ethics, identity, Related Content, search

Reforming Media Will Help Reform Conferences

Benjamin Melançon
10:30 AM | bio | Comments: 0

At Journalism That Matters "The New Pamphleteers," held earlier this week in Minneapolis, every session meant horizontal communication: no one on a stage, a circle of chairs with the facilitator at the same level as anyone else. John Nichols is most certainly one of my favorite organizers of the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), going on now in Minneapolis. He visited the earlier, far smaller New Pamphleteers and represented what is wrong with the NCMR model of conference. He dropped in without having attended the rest of the New Pamphleteers, without having had the experiences all the rest of... continued...

Topics: Diversity, Participation, Technology
Tagged: democracy, democratic media, jury, media, NCMR2008, PWGD

Killing Trees and the Future of News Online

Benjamin Melançon
10:03 AM | bio | Comments: 7

Seth Godin on the news buiness versus the paper business: Jason wrote in to ask why I thought that the newspaper industry was in a Dip. In my book, I point out that with classified ads disappearing and the web thriving, the days of newspapers as we know them are clearly over. That shouldn't mean the industry is in trouble. In fact, there are more people reading more news every day than ever before--without the cost of printing and distributing a costly piece of newsprint every day. Happy days... But (many of) the people in the industry have built their... continued...

Topics: Government & Politics, Legal Issues, Philosophy
Tagged: advertising, bankruptcy, Godin, idea law, intellectual property, IPR, Rushkoff, trees

Signal-to-Noise and Related Content

Benjamin Melançon
4:09 PM | bio | Comments: 1

Related Content: If you're in California's bay area, don't miss Drupal Day on Friday May 3, a special open session of NewsTools2008's mixing up journalists, technologists, entrepreneurs. Journalism's charge is to increase the signal to noise ratio. Some commentators on stuff, including my favorite marketing guru, say the irrelevant noise has begun encroaching on the signal that matters, after some years of improvement driven by online tools. I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can't. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem. As mentioned by IdeaLab bloggers and elsewhere, solving this problem is a... continued...

Topics: Participation, Philosophy, Technology
Tagged: aggregation, communication, control, dissemination, investigation, journalism, privacy, PWGD, Related Content

What Drives News Decisions (What Are They Thinking)?

Benjamin Melançon
11:01 AM | bio | Comments: 2

Senator Barack Obama mischaracterized statements of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. To be charitable, there's only so many media narratives any one person or even campaign can try to change at one time. That's my question for today: how are these media narratives formed in the first place, and why? Easier question: Did you see the videos below? The seven and ten minute versions, not the seven and ten second versions? Obama, in his speech, chose to defend Wright as a person and a leader, but he denounced the statements as divisive and reflecting a static view of progress in history. In... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Government & Politics, Philosophy
Tagged: context, decisions, God, justice, media, Obama, sermons, United States, Wright

Markets Fail News

Benjamin Melançon
8:12 AM | bio | Comments: 3

Thanks to Chris O'Brien's challenge, serious talk of business models for journalism have come to the IdeaLab blog. Let's pause a moment for an overarching view. Turn off the bright lights and stare into the empty studio. Markets - selling and buying at prices set by supply and demand - don't work for news and information. Valuable news is a public good. All right, if you care about journalism, you already believed that. But news is also a public good in the sense economists use the term: once one person comes into possession of it, everybody can have it. Expensive... continued...

Topics: Financial, Marketing
Tagged: economics, idea, incentive, information, markets, news, propaganda, subsidy

Fragmentation of Media is Democratization of Media: Retaining Reach

Benjamin Melançon
7:50 AM | bio | Comments: 1

Oso uses a German pilot's statement that he would not have shot down the author of the Little Prince, had he known, to ask: Will Global Voices' coverage of Iranian bloggers have any influence one way or the other on a potential US invasion? It is comforting to think that it could, but realistically, I doubt it. (I'm going to project a little there and clarify that it's comforting to think it could prevent a U.S. attack- which would probably be in the form of Guernica-esque bombing, rather than a land invasion.) Oso concludes: the fragmentation of media is part... continued...

Topics: Diversity, Government & Politics, Participation
Tagged: connection, democracy, democratic communication, democratization, fragmentation, media, PWGD

The San Jose Mercury News and Gary Webb

Benjamin Melançon
9:43 AM | bio | Comments: 1

The San Jose Mercury News' location in Silicon Valley is not the first reason it should have become the newspaper of record in the Internet age. Reading about this year's round of layoffs and cutbacks, I think about the journalist the Mercury News cut off twelve years ago during boom times. In 1996, a series of articles by Gary Webb showed the Central Intelligence Agency's complicity in bringing crack cocaine into Los Angeles. Profits from the new, highly addictive, and illegal drug supported the U.S.-backed Contras' war of terror against the people of Nicaragua during the 1980s. In those first... continued...

Topics: Government & Politics, Philosophy, Technology
Tagged: CIA, cocaine, Contra, crack, Gary Webb, government, media, Nicaragua, self-censorship

National Awareness Days are a Cry for Help

Benjamin Melançon
5:53 AM | bio | Comments: 0

Today, March first, is National Self-Injury Awareness Day. You may not know much about this issue. A Google news search turned up one article, in the independent Charleston Gazette. I am meaningfully aware that people self-injure only through a friend's yearly blog post to mark self-injury awareness day: "We are male and female. We are artists, athletes, students, and business owners. We have depression, DID, PTSD, eating disorders, borderline personalities, bipolar disorder, or maybe no formal diagnosis at all. Some of us were abused, some were not. We are straight, bi, and gay. We come from all walks of life... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Diversity, Philosophy
Tagged: coverage, cutting, definition, importance, matters, media, news, self-injury

What Did You Call Me?

Benjamin Melançon
6:56 AM | bio | Comments: 5

Marketing guru Seth Godin urges companies to start calling "potential customers" and "targets" instead citizens. He means this term to be inclusive of those who have a relationship with the marketer and those who do not and to bring about a mental shift toward respect and humility. Nice to know that journalists are ahead of the marketers on this. Every self-respecting journalist I know cringes a little when some business-side person at a conference calls readers/viewers/listeners consumers. Indeed, many of us have lept over readers/viewers/listeners to pay "the people formerly known as the audience" a great mark of respect (from... continued...

Topics: Marketing, Participation, Philosophy
Tagged: citizen journalism, name, the people formerly known as the audience

Every Nonprofit Tries to Give People Information, Which is Power

Benjamin Melançon
8:54 AM | bio | Comments: 8

At this year's SalesForce.com Foundation gathering, "Innovation for Nonprofit Success," the recurring theme was less the SalesForce software than the broader topic of the social web. This is to SalesForce's credit; Suzanne DiBianca, cofounder and director of the Foundation, set the tone when she introduced Holly Ross, Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, as the keynote speaker. "What I really want to talk about is power," Ross said early in her presentation. "Because powerful people can make change." "At the heart of every nonprofit you are trying to give people information, and information is power." Ross and other presenters... continued...

Topics: Diversity, Participation, Technology
Tagged: journalism, media, nonprofits, npotech, Salesforce

WikiLeaks Block Hurts Anonymity Everywhere

Benjamin Melançon
5:39 PM | bio | Comments: 6

Anonymous communication online is becoming quite a theme here on Idea Lab. The web site WikiLeaks.org (if you're in the United States, right now you'll have to access it through their IP address) reports that it has been censored by U.S. court injunction (it is also banned in China). The point of the web site is to allow people to post anonymously information - in large quantities - that governments and corporations don't want people to know. This is bad. Taking down a domain name is a drastic measure for suppressing information on the Internet. If this is not pushed... continued...

Topics: Government & Politics, Legal Issues, Technology
Tagged: censorship

We the Media, How Have We Failed: "Re: Fwd: Who is Barack Obama?"

Benjamin Melançon
7:36 AM | bio | Comments: 10

This is old news, I know. Various political forums mentioned the "Obama is a MUSLIM" e-mail smear campaign more than a month ago. But when I read about it, my understanding was this hatemongering and lying - or at least the lying - had been laid to rest. But then the e-mail was forwarded to me. Thoughtfully. As in, "you should know this." I trust this friend. This friend is a good person. This friend has a college degree and has read more books than most of our presidential candidates, probably. And this friend forwarded me a whole troop of... continued...

Topics: Diversity, Government & Politics, Participation
Tagged: Barack Hussein Obama, lies, politics, propaganda

When Frames Go Bad: My Apology to NYT Reporter Jens Erik Gould

Benjamin Melançon
2:44 PM | bio | Comments: 1

A previous post of mine had an inflammatory headline unjustified by the text: "Lies about Venezuela: If NYT.com ran Related Content". I was guilty of looking at Jens Erik Gould's article, "Venezuela's Fateful Choice," through a frame: that major media coverage overwhelmingly seeks to portray the Venezuelan government as illegitimate and bad. My own view (frame) that the New York Times has that overall frame overrode a good analysis of the article. I apologize specifically to the reporter. Gould's article, while (despite the headline) primarily about accusations that the Venezuelan government lacks financial transparency, was not by itself part of... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Government & Politics, Philosophy
Tagged: Venezuela

It's Our Web?

Benjamin Melançon
10:59 AM | bio | Comments: 2

How about this for a video game? Free Speech TV has put out a short video about the current and threatened enclosure of the Internet: Disclosure: The video is produced by Steve Anderson, whose COA News is a client of Agaric Design Collective. Some surprising background on the current extent of concentration and tracking supplements the video. Ironically, it comes off a little like an ad for the FreeSpeech.org community, but I strongly agree with the premise of online spaces under the control of regular folks, meaning notably open source free software and not legally owned by corporate stockholders. I... continued...

Topics: Audio/Visual, Diversity, Participation
Tagged: free speech, Internet, media consolidation

Lies about Venezuela: If NYT.com ran Related Content

Benjamin Melançon
5:34 PM | bio | Comments: 9

Lara, Venezuela, lacks widespread internet access, cutting off Agaric Design Collective from our sysadmin. If you want to tell us Hugo Chávez's administration in Venezuela is doing a bad job developing the country, we have reason to listen, with prejudice. But the accusations slipping unchallenged into news articles that Venezuela is anti-democratic, that Chávez is unpopular, and that the proposed constitutional reforms up for approval tomorrow are unlikely to pass - these are lies with consequences. These unsourced and poorly sourced claims, dripping like acid rain showers on the informed public's understanding of Venezuela - are lies where the truth matters.... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Government & Politics, Participation, Technology
Tagged: Juan Forero, lies, news, NYT, Related Content, Venezuela

Geotagged News and Drupal: Why Wait?

Benjamin Melançon
12:58 PM | bio | Comments: 4

A week or so ago Dan Schultz posted here about the potential for geotagging. Technically, the basics of geotagging is coming along: the Drupal shop Development Seed announced today "We Will Geocode Anything," using a news-tagging service and a Python script to add locations to news stories. (This is part of their larger project Managing News.) Dan, however, outlined a list of things he needed for geotagging news to be exciting. A commenter on his blog reiterated that the ability to geographically tag things by region or a shape drawn on the map (and defined by multiple pairs of coordinates)... continued...

Topics: Technology
Tagged: drupal, geotag, geotagging, news

Open Journalism Challenge: Can Paid Media Report on Plan Mexico this Well?

Benjamin Melançon
12:12 PM | bio | Comments: 2

Immigration, military contractors, fiscal responsibility, foreign policy, domestic policy, trade policy, business, labor, crime- this story has it all, plus underlying themes about access to information and democracy (optional, if you care to report on those kinds of things). And all with a presidential race coming up! Is your favorite news source keeping up? The Bush administration is trying to get Congress to approve what it calls the Merida Initiative, a $1.4 billion aid package to Mexico in order to fight drug cartels. The plan is more commonly known as Plan Mexico because of its inevitable similarities with Plan Colombia,... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Government & Politics, Philosophy
Tagged: Indymedia, journalism, Mexico, Plan Mexico

Armistice Day

Benjamin Melançon
10:59 AM | bio | Comments: 0

I wanted to riff on the free software requirement some more. To prove, with eloquent argument, that so-called uncompromising radicals drive needed change. That efforts toward free software alternatives to Flash my push Adobe to make Flash itself truly free. To argue that if you want modest changes for the better, many advocates of hopeless causes are your most important allies. To turn this discussion toward journalism, and how we need a radical commitment to some core principles if we aren't to lose all sense of truth and what matters. But, fortunately for you all, it is the eleventh hour... continued...

Topics: Philosophy
Tagged: armistice day

Microsoft Demonstrates that Free Software is about Control of Our Own Future

Benjamin Melançon
6:08 AM | bio | Comments: 1

This is a follow-up to Amanda Hickman's post on open source free software games. Microsoft made tech news in the past week with reports that schools in Nigeria would use Windows XP rather than the Mandriva Linux on 17,000 computers ordered from Mandriva, a French GNU-Linux vendor. Public statements from Mandriva officials suggested foul play, but not many details were reported. Now, the Nigerian government has overruled the switch, Jeremy Kirk of IDG News Service reported, and his article published online yesterday by Computerworld UK has a lot more information on what actually happened. Nigeria's Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF),... continued...

Topics: Education, Government & Politics, Philosophy
Tagged: computers, education, free software, freedom, Linux, Microsoft

Is This News? Reporting with Opinion on Plan Mexico

Benjamin Melançon
12:35 PM | bio | Comments: 8

What is the public to do when an important matter such as $1.4 billion of military-police funding for a neighboring country head toward Congressional rubber-stamping with little media coverage? We take what we can get. And that tends to be reporting from people who have no steady income assured for their considerable journalistic efforts. When one does reporting out of a love of and a concern for humanity, one tends bring some of one's own perspective to the task. And in part what we get appears to be what we want. Alternative sources and aggregators for points of view are... continued...

Topics: Best Practices, Participation, Philosophy
Tagged: Indymedia, journalism, Mexico, opinion, truth, voice

Advertising and Information Asymmetry Online

Benjamin Melançon
2:01 AM | bio | Comments: 0

Mark Andrejevic: Living through the '90s, there was this euphoric set of predictions about the empowering and democratizing capacity of the new medium. I read that against what the current political and economic situation looks like today. [...] What concerns me is the way in which the celebration of the potential so quickly slides into a claim that this potential is being actualized. An interview with the author of iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Well worth the read. As long as the funding model for journalism is advertising-based, these issues will frame our work and - in... continued...

Topics: Financial, Government & Politics, Marketing
Tagged: advertising, privacy, security

What's Not News? Unflattering Trivialities, Opinions on Planet's Shape, and Fake Press Conferences

Benjamin Melançon
6:00 AM | bio | Comments: 0

We can make some easy progress defining news by instead listing what's not news. Paul Krugman interviewed by Rory O'Connor: several major parts of the news media that are for all practical purposes part of "movement conservatism" -- Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Times -- and [...] other news organizations are intimidated, at least to some extent. I sometimes talk about what I call "asymmetrical intimidation." If you say a true but unflattering thing about Bush or in fact about any other prominent conservative, oh, boy! People are going to go after you. I mean, I've got... continued...

Topics: Government & Politics, Philosophy
Tagged: news, Paul Krugman, politics

FCC's Short-Notice Localism Hearing

Benjamin Melançon
12:54 PM | bio | Comments: 6

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin announced the upcoming hearing on localism with less than a week notice. Though there's still time to speak up for local news and localism in media, this short notice shortchanges the public. Don't take my word for it- here are two of the five FCC members stating their view: JOINT STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONERS MICHAEL J. COPPS AND JONATHAN S. ADELSTEIN IN RESPONSE TO FCC'S ANNOUNCEMENT OF LOCALISM HEARING WITH ONLY ONE WEEK'S NOTICE Tonight's Public Notice doesn't bode well for the future of the Commission's localism and media ownership proceedings. Over two weeks ago, we agreed... continued...

Topics: Government & Politics
Tagged: democracy, FCC, localism, media, radio

Educate: Journalism and Teaching Technologies

Benjamin Melançon
7:45 AM | bio | Comments: 2

Many who spoke at the Online News Association conference in Toronto defined education (of the public) as an important part of journalists' work. Most of us clearly do not feel the need to fulfill Toronto-raised Mary Harris "Mother" Jones' injunction to educate, agitate, organize (and not doing so is a disservice news organizations do to themselves and to society, I will argue later), but what would taking seriously the responsibility to educate, by itself, mean for news? The related content to which this connects is an online video recommended at the conference by Jeff Young (of the Chronicle for Higher... continued...

Topics: Audio/Visual, Education, Games & Virtual Worlds, Participation, Philosophy
Tagged: educate, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, ONA, Wesch

What is Your Definition of News?

Benjamin Melançon
3:10 PM | bio | Comments: 1

In the spirit of Web 2.0 - getting y'all to do the work - I request you to do it over at RootTruth.org, a site I put up for this and playing with the Drupal module I will make. Sign up and post an element of how you define news.... continued...

Topics: Participation
Tagged: definition, news

What is News? What's Important? And Who Decides?

Benjamin Melançon
12:11 AM | bio | Comments: 0

What is news? If we define news as what's important, and we were to ask regular folks what they considered important enough to be in the news each day, I wager we'd get a much more serviceable media than we have now. Serviceable, in the sense that we would have an idea of what's happening in our world and, equally important, an understanding of how to affect the conditions that shape our lives.. In blogging about Related Content, the little Drupal module which will try to show that news plus ideas can equal action (that will be the next day's... continued...

Topics: Philosophy
Tagged: definition, introduction, journalism, media, news