Check it out wanna b's: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/22/magazine/the-lives-they-lived.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

WikiLeaks as data base of information - facts for journalists. Here is a small not from slashdot:Using WikiLeaks As a Tool In Investigative Journalism | from the army-of-one dept. | posted by timothy on Monday December 19, @08:07 (The Media) | with 36 comments | https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/12/18/1929237/using-wikileaks-as-a-tool-in-investigative-journalism?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [0]Hugh Pickens writes writes "It took a team of ten reporters working two months to [1]sift through 250,000 confidential American diplomatic cables at the NY Times, but when a story idea recently came up that I wanted to research in more detail, I found Wikileaks to be a very useful and accessible tool for further investigation. First, some background: For the past ten years I have written stories about Peace Corps safety and medical issues, the Peace Corps' budget appropriations, and the work done by volunteers in their countries of service on a web site I publish called 'Peace Corps Online.' When the Peace Corps announced last month they were taking the unusual step of suspending their program in Kazakhstan and withdrawing all 117 volunteers, I decided to dig deeper and find out what was behind the decision to leave the country. First I went to blogs of volunteers serving in Kazakhstan and found that [2]four rapes or sexual assaults of volunteers had occurred in the past year and that it had became increasingly difficult for volunteers to conduct their work. But the biggest revelation was when I found [3]fourteen U.S. diplomatic cables on Wikileaks that cited elements in the Kazakhstani 'pro-Russian old-guard at the Committee for National Security (the KNB, successor to the KGB) aimed at discrediting the Peace Corps and damaging bilateral relations' with the U.S. Further investigation on Wikileaks revealed how [4]one Peace Corps volunteer had been sentenced to two years imprisonment in 2009 after 'what appeared to be a classic Soviet-style set-up.' The volunteer was only freed through the diplomatic efforts of U.S. Ambassador Richard Hoagland and the personal intervention of Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev." Discuss this story at: https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/12/18/1929237/using-wikileaks-as-a-tool-in-investigative-journalism?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting Links: 0. http://peacecorpsonline.org/ 1. http://www.neontommy.com/news/2010/12/wikileaks-and-future-journalism-interview-new-york-times-scott-shane 2. http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/pickens-writes-writes/2011/11/18/sexual-assaults-and-terrorism-are-factors-leading-peace-corps-to-suspend-program-in-kazakhstan/ 3. http://researchandideas.com/index.php?title=PCV_Anthony_Sharp 4. http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/messages/467/4004545.html

For all writers or for that matter all creative producers the problem of plagiarism is always present. Being sensitive to crediting your sources should be an automatic part of the process of a journalist. Here, from CNN, is a long story about a smart young man who through complete fabrication ruined his life:(CNN) -- Stephen Glass, the whiz-kid magazine writer exposed 13 years ago as a serial fabricator, is telling what may be his most compelling story yet -- his own. He swears he's not making it up, and he's asking California's highest court to believe him and give him a chance. Glass, who graduated in 2000 from Georgetown's law school, works as a paralegal for a firm in Beverly Hills, California. But he really wants to be a lawyer, and he insists he's remorseful, reformed and committed to telling the truth. Others aren't so sure, which is why a bar application that usually would be a no-brainer is taking five years and counting. There is no question that Glass is brilliant, and he easily passed the bar exams in New York and California. But his budding legal career has become snagged on the jagged rocks of good character and moral fitness. The latest installment in the infamous fabulist's saga is contained in a thick file at the California Supreme Court. Opened to the public late last month, it finally offers an explanation for why Glass once felt driven to publish lie after lie, and then lie some more to cover it all up. But this case also raises some difficult questions: Can he, should he be forgiven? Is his redemption even possible? Or, once a liar, always a liar? "Maybe there are certain types of behavior you never get over," said Arnold Siegel, an ethics professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. But, he added, "The Bar has a fairly compassionate view. They do believe in rehabilitation." Adam Penenberg, the writer who first outed Glass' lies in 1998, took a more ironic view: Adam Penenberg gained notoriety when his 1998 Forbes article first revealed Glass' fabrications. "When I first learned of Glass' quest to join the legal profession, I thought, Christ, it's been 13 years. And, since when does lying disqualify someone from being a lawyer? Let the guy earn a living," he wrote for fastcompany.com. "Leave it to Glass to disgrace himself in one mistrusted profession only to apply to another." Lawyers and journalists aren't highly regarded, although they usually rank a notch above lobbyists, members of Congress and used car salespeople in Gallup's annual Honesty and Ethics survey. Nurses, teachers and doctors are considered the most trustworthy professionals. Glass' father was a doctor, and his mother a nurse, and they didn't think much of lawyers or journalists, which is a big part of his story. Glass insists he has undergone a dramatic character change, even if he looks very much the same as he nears 40 as he did at 25 -- wiry with short brown hair and glasses, the prototypical nerd. One of his psychiatrists explains that as an immature young man, Glass was so eager to succeed that his lying became compulsive, like a gambler's high. He lied and lied and lied until he lost it all. Glass and his supporters say he is now almost compulsive about the truth -- to the point where he usually volunteers that he is that Stephen Glass, and even went back to a store to return excess change he'd been given. But he shouldn't be permitted to simply gloss over his past, Rachel Grunberg, associate counsel for the California State Bar, said in an interview with CNN. "Given the egregiousness of Glass' past misconduct, that goes to the heart of what we look at -- truthfulness, honesty, respect for others." Those aren't traits magazine editor Richard Bradley associates with the Stephen Glass he knew in 1998. At least three of the pieces Glass wrote for him at George magazine contained fabrications, he told CNN. The bulk of Glass' lies were concocted at The New Republic, a small but influential magazine, where he was unmasked as a serial faker and fired. "Steve was figuring out people's blind spots -- their biases, prejudices -- including myself. He wrote pieces that benefited him at the expense of those people," said Bradley, now the editor-in-chief of Worth magazine. "I do forgive Steve, but being a lawyer is a privilege, not a right," he added. "He can be a fully contributing, valuable member of society without being a lawyer." The overwhelming evidence testifies to his maturation, reformation and rehabilitation. -- Arthur Margolis, Glass' lawyer Glass withdrew his application to the New York State Bar in 2003, when it became obvious he would be turned down. He applied to the California Bar in 2005, after he moved to Los Angeles. The bar committee declined to find him morally fit to be a lawyer; Glass appealed and the State Bar Court sided with him last year. The California Supreme Court will have the final word, having added "In Re Glass on Admission" to its docket for 2012. Everyone agrees that what Glass did in 1998 was inexcusable. But, as the State Bar Court points out, the past is not the issue: it's Glass' moral character today. The bar examiners -- the lawyers who vet other lawyers -- argue that Glass' lies were so "staggering" he hasn't done enough to demonstrate he has reformed. "Going to law school and living a normal life isn't enough," Grunberg said. If Glass "were to fabricate evidence in legal matters as readily and effectively as he falsified material for magazine articles, the harm to the public and the profession would be immeasurable," observed State Bar Court Judge Catherine Purcell, dissenting from two other judges who found Glass morally fit to practice law. Glass' lawyer, Arthur Margolis, argues that his client has indeed changed and that the sins of a callow 25-year-old won't be repeated: "He is now 39. The overwhelming evidence testifies to his maturation, reformation and rehabilitation over the past 13 years." Without a doubt, Glass knows how to tell a great story. His eye for whimsical detail and ear for the salient quote made him Washington's journalistic darling. An internal investigation at The New Republic revealed that more than half of his stories had been fudged in some way -- starting with a quote here and an anecdote there until entire stories were pure fiction. Even the notes, e-mail and voice mail messages that were supposed to back up his stories were faked. Friends and colleagues felt betrayed by the amusing but insecure boy wonder. His dream profession -- journalism -- took a credibility hit, and Glass holed up in his apartment, cringing and crying as he was hounded by reporters who were like him in so many ways -- except that they sought the truth: Why'd you do it, Steve? Part One: The Failure Glass didn't really have an answer until now, and he says it took years of psychotherapy to find it. His quasi-autobiographical 2003 novel, "The Fabulist," didn't come close to telling the story the California Bar has heard. In 2003, Glass published his quasi-autobiographical novel, "The Fabulist." He turned down CNN's request for an interview. His past attempts to explain have been viewed by some as self-serving, and so he has little to gain and much to lose by speaking out as he awaits the court's decision. Almost all of his supporters also declined to comment, as did one of his most vocal critics, Charles Lane, the former editor who investigated Glass' lies at The New Republic. Of those who know Glass, only Bradley and a former law school professor would talk to CNN; besides their words, we're left with what was said in the court papers. The thick court file reveals that Glass has won over some very smart and accomplished people who initially doubted him but now can be counted among his closest friends. They tell an inspiring story of failure, remorse and redemption, one that makes you want to believe there is good in everyone. But others who feel burned and betrayed by Glass -- as well as those whose duty it is to protect the public -- can't help wonder whether the fabulist has told his last lie. More than anything, Glass' parents wanted him, their first-born son, to be a doctor, just like his father. "It was a moral calling in my family that one becomes a doctor," he said at a bar hearing. But Glass wasn't cut out for medicine. He fainted at the sight of blood. Dissecting animals made him squeamish. (He's now a strict vegetarian.) Growing up in Highland Park, an affluent suburb on Chicago's North Shore, Glass was a standout student and a social dud. His mother kept a meticulous home. Beds were made with hospital corners and, as Glass told the court, "you could eat off the floors." Food in the refrigerator was arranged just so -- "apples on one side, oranges on the other" -- and only his mother could open the refrigerator door. But this orderly house was a pressure cooker. There were lots of rules and high expectations. As Glass' lawyers noted, almost drolly: "The family members' interactions with each other precluded dissent by the children." The parents grilled Stephen and his younger brother, Michael, on their studies, making them stand and recite answers. Stephen Glass recalled being "frozen out" by his mother when he disappointed her. "If she was upset with you, she would stop speaking to you in the house, except for the most minute things," he testified. During the freeze-outs, which could last weeks, she showered "over the top love" on his brother "so I could see what I was not getting." His father would react in a manner Glass described as "rageful, stomping around, screaming and yelling." He was an anxious kid, eager to please but always seeming to fall short. He had frequent chest pains, caused by stress. Sometimes he'd double over in pain. "It was apparent to everybody that I was just insanely worried about everything all the time," he recalled. He felt woefully inadequate and believed he was a failure as a son. At school, it wasn't any better. He was a "nerd," so bad in gym class that his parents hired a tutor to teach him how to climb a rope. My father was rageful and my mother was freezing me out. -- Stephen Glass Classmates mocked him. During a health class focusing on the dangers of teenage pregnancy, the teacher "married" him to a classmate, and they were to jointly care for a doll. The girl was horrified, and she and her parents lobbied to have the marriage annulled. He withdrew socially and sought the company of adults, eating lunch every day with his Spanish teacher. His parents worried that his lack of social skills would hurt his chances of getting into medical school. "My dad would just say to me -- it was in high school -- 'Why can't you just hold a beer when you're at a party? Like, I want you to, like, meet girls.' The court heard only Glass' version of his childhood. His parents and brother did not participate in the bar hearings. His psychiatrists say Glass has mended his relationship with his parents, but has set up "boundaries." There was no response to messages left at his father's medical offices. Glass insists he's not resorting to the abuse excuse. "It can be easy to misunderstand me and think that, when I talk about my parents and the family dynamics that occurred, that in some way I am blaming my parents or saying my parents are at fault for what I did wrong," he told the California Bar Court. "I feel that zero percent. My parents are complicated people. ... So, when we talk about this, I think it's important that I'm saying it to help explain, but not in any way as an excuse." Part Two: Shattered Glass The chest pains intensified as Glass waited to hear whether he'd be accepted by his father's alma mater. They immediately stopped when he learned he'd gotten in at the University of Pennsylvania -- with a scholarship. He enrolled in the pre-med program but also joined the college newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, over his parents' objections. They considered it "frivolous" and feared it would interfere with his studies. Glass thrived at the paper, even as he flunked organic chemistry. "This made my parents very, very, very angry. My father was rageful and my mother was freezing me out," he recalled. The future they'd so carefully mapped out for their oldest son wasn't going according to plan, and so a compromise was struck: Glass could go to law school -- "a garbage profession" in his parents' opinion -- if he enrolled in a program that also gave him a medical degree. He got into New York University but deferred enrolling to try his hand at Washington journalism. His parents considered it a "ridiculous" career move. He joined The New Republic in 1995 as an intern and immediately felt at home with a group of people he genuinely liked being around. To Glass, the weekly editorial pitch meetings felt like "a family dinner." "You would go around the table and you would announce what stories you were working on, and these were jovial meetings," he said. "There was a lot of energy and electricity in these meetings," he added, calling them "the highlight of my entire week." He was thrilled "seeing all these people that I had been reading." He desperately wanted them to like him. I ... felt very powerfully the desire to please my parents, please my editors, and to succeed. -- Stephen Glass Back at home, tensions between Glass and his parents came to a head during a Passover visit in the spring of 1996. He was proud of what he was doing and had given his parents a subscription to the magazine. "They thought this was the stupidest thing in the world. They didn't read my pieces," he said. "They just thought this is folly." He was "doing a bad job, poorly," they scolded, and his mother added a dig: "Maybe at least you're working on your social life." He took it hard: "I cried some, I know, and I had trouble sleeping, and I felt really distant from my family. I felt that I would not be a success in any way in their eyes unless I went to medical school and fulfilled those dreams and, you know, I knew that I was not suited for medical school." Not long after the Passover confrontation, Glass began fabricating articles. "The Hall Monitor" included his first made-up quote -- initially inserted as "a place holder," he said. He kept the quote in the story and was praised for it. The boy who had learned to recite his lessons for his parents soon was the star of the weekly pitch meetings. He replaced the disapproval he received at home with the praise and popularity he found at work, where he was known as "The Hub" -- always seeming to be at the center of office gossip. His fabrications mushroomed. From July to December 1996, they were limited to a few fudged quotes or anecdotes. They increased through 1997. From that December until he was fired in May 1998, nearly every article Glass wrote either contained huge fabrications or were completely made up. "I was very, very, very much wanted, and felt very powerfully the desire to please my parents, please my editors, and to succeed at this," he said. He wanted the magazine staff to love him the way he felt his family did not. One of his psychiatrists, Richard Rosenthal, told the bar that Glass' relationship with his parents, "set the stage" for his "almost addictive need for approval and success." He compared Glass' compulsive lying to behavior shown by gambling addicts: "They just want it to be over. They're physically and emotionally exhausted, and they can't lose it fast enough, they can't stop, they're just going through it as quickly as they can until there's nothing left." When the lies were discovered, editor Charles Lane fired Glass. "I was terrified and insane and anxious, and I saw my world collapsing around me. I thought that I would lose this entire family that I had built. I didn't really have this family. I was lying to them all," Glass recalled. The court file lists his final accounting: 43 fabricated articles, 36 of them in The New Republic. The others were published by: George, 3; Rolling Stone, 2, and a single freelance piece in Policy Review. He went home to his family a basket case. He talked of suicide, and his parents kept a close eye on him. And then they suggested his firing was "an opportunity to go to medical school." Part Three: Reinvention Glass returned instead to Georgetown's Law Center, where he had been taking classes at night. One of his professors, Susan Low Bloch, reached out to him. "I realized there had been a Steve Glass in my class who had done very well, so I called him and asked, 'Are you that Steve Glass who is in all the papers?' " she told CNN in a telephone interview. He said that he was, and she invited him to stop by for a talk. She saw him "as someone who just got in this whirlpool," and so she offered him a hand. Georgetown law professor Susan Low Bloch befriended Glass and later testified in his behalf at his bar hearing. "He was so remorseful and so devastated by this that it was worth my while to give him a chance to show me he could do legal research without embellishing it," said Bloch, who had clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as a law student. She hired Glass as her research assistant. But first she made him promise to be honest with her if he couldn't find an answer "and not make something up just to please me." She never regretted taking a chance on Glass, and eventually came to trust him so much that she recommended him to two judges. She flew to California to vouch for him at his bar hearing. "I take in stray cats, too," Bloch told CNN. "I believe you don't throw people out; you don't toss them out as garbage because of a mistake." Julie Hilden also gambled on Stephen Glass. She had first seen him in the offices of Williams & Connolly, the prestigious Washington law firm where she worked for David Kendall, the civil lawyer for Bill and Hillary Clinton. It was 1998, the height of the scandal, and Glass was talking with his lawyer at the firm about how he could confirm his fabrications to the magazine without digging himself into a deeper legal hole. She walked in to get some papers signed for another case. "I looked at him and I just went, 'My God, this person is the most depressed person I've ever seen,' " she told the bar court. Two years later, a mutual friend introduced them. She was skeptical, but they started dating, putting him "on probation." If she sensed he was untrustworthy, she was gone. And then she says she "fell in love with him." In 2001, after she had moved to New York to pursue writing, Hilden woke up in a hospital emergency room and, she said, "He was instantly, immediately there." He drove from Washington to New York every weekend during her seven tough months of recovery from colitis. "He put up with me even though I was not in a great mood because I was just dead sick," Hilden told the court. During early parts of their relationship, he seemed traumatized and insecure and often woke up with nightmares. He always seemed to be looking for affirmation, which she found "a bit irritating." Now, she says, he has matured and gained confidence, and she considers him her "life partner." Their relationship wouldn't have lasted if he were not "completely honest" with her, she said. "I feel completely committed to Steve." They only reason they haven't married is one of principle: There will be no wedding until their gay friends can also get married, she said. When Hilden began dating Glass, one of her best friends was horrified. Melanie Thernstrom, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, said she tried to talk her out of seeing him. "As a journalist, I had very strong negative feelings about what he did, as the members of my community all did." Thernstrom told the bar court. But he eventually won her over, too. "Getting to know him, I went from horrified to skeptical, and then grudging, like, 'Well, he seems nice but he probably isn't, you know, deep down. Maybe it's all an act.' " Over the years, she said, it slowly dawned on her that "he is really a wonderful person." She added, "This journey I took from horror to affirmation is one I saw every one of Julie's friends go through over the years, and there is not a single friend of hers now who doesn't feel the same way I do." She has so much trust in Glass that in 2009, she and her husband asked Hilden and Glass to be the godparents of their children, she said. Richard Bradley was editor at George magazine when Glass fabricated three stories for the publication. Glass has undergone extensive therapy -- in Washington and New York, as well as in Los Angeles, where he still sees two therapists. He long ago ended his compulsive lying, they say, but he continues to work on rebuilding his life. As part of that process, he wrote his book and about 100 letters of apology to the people he harmed with his fabrications. Bradley, who met Glass for coffee, forgives him for fudging at least three of the articles Bradley edited at George magazine. But because the apology letters came when Glass had a book coming out and was trying to gain admission to the New York Bar, Bradley considers them self-serving. He told CNN he was disappointed. "I wasn't reassured. I wanted to be reassured," he said. He wanted to hear a heartfelt apology. "There were things he could have done to show more genuine regret," Bradley added. "He could have written a memoir, not a novel." Glass' lawyers point out that if his motives were truly selfish, he would have sent a computer-generated mass mailing and kept copies. Instead, he wrote each letter out by hand, tailoring it to an individual. Friends who knew him at the time say it was exhausting and agonizing for him. After Glass and Hilden moved to Los Angeles in 2004, he applied for jobs at law firms. One of his resumes crossed the desk of Paul Zuckerman, managing partner of a plaintiff's litigation firm. He was impressed with the resume, but then he read the cover letter. "I was familiar with the story. I knew who he was. And I kind of laughed to myself and promptly deleted his resume," Zuckerman told the bar court. But then he thought about his own struggle with alcohol, and how he'd come back from the brink. "I sat there, which is unusual for me, to sit there and be reflective during the day. ... I have been a liar in my life. I myself have had some problems and have had difficulties that I've overcome, and I've been given a very big second chance, and I thought that I was being incredibly judgmental ..." He invited Glass in for an interview. "I called him mainly because I felt ... it was wrong for me to be judgmental and to throw somebody away without ever having given them a chance or ever having talked to them," Zuckerman said. Upon meeting Glass, he became convinced that he had gone through a genuine transformation. He could see the remorse in his eyes. He hired Glass on he spot, but at first watched him closely. "When I first hired him, there was no way I was giving him my Social Security number and my mother's maiden name," Zuckerman told the California Bar. "He can have that today." He advised Glass that his downfall ultimately would make him a better lawyer: "I've always found brilliance untempered by failure is purely arrogance but brilliance that has overcome failure can be truly useful to your fellow man," he said. He's glad he opened his mind to Glass' potential. Those who saw the promise in a 25-year-old fabulist may still feel the sting of disappointment and betrayal. But for Zuckerman and others who believe in redemption, the latest story by Stephen Glass is nothing short of fabulous. It's about a man transformed. "I love having him at the office, because he is like my touchstone, my benchmark for honest and proper conduct. It's like 'What would Steve do?' " Editor's note: Beth Karas, a correspondent at In Session on CNN's sister network, truTV, is a former Manhattan prosecutor. She is an inactive member of the New York State Bar.

Again the problem of definition and you is the definer:Bloggers Not Journalists, Federal Judge Rules | from the occupation-foole dept. | posted by timothy on Thursday December 08, @11:40 (The Courts) | with 313 comments | https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/08/1558233/bloggers-not-journalists-federal-judge-rules?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New submitter squideatingdough writes "On InfoWorld, Robert X. Cringely covers a recent case of a blogger accused of libel and defamation. The federal judge ruled that [0]journalists warrant more protection from libel suits than bloggers, but it is obvious from the article that bloggers' rights can vary by state, depending on the 'shield laws' in force." Reader [1]blindseer adds a link to this [2]AP article on the case, and asks "If the government can define who is part of the press, and therefore gets First Amendment protections, then where does that place the freedom of the press?" The slippery slope is a steep one; even some relatively open societies require [3]licensure for journalists ([4]visiting ones included) with [5]predictable results. (And the Labour Party would like to see a [6]similar system in the UK.) Discuss this story at: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/08/1558233/bloggers-not-journalists-federal-judge-rules?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting Links: 0. http://www.infoworld.com/t/cringely/bloggers-youre-second-class-citizens-now-181148 1. mailto:blindseer@earthlink.net 2. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_BLOGGER_DEFAMATION_SUIT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-12-07-20-39-18 3. http://www.ejc.net/magazine/article/italian_freelance_journalists_protest_against_precarious_working_conditions/ 4. http://www.esteri.it/MAE/EN/Sala_Stampa/AreaGiornalisti/Guida_per_stampa_estera.htm 5. http://www.economist.com/node/14560942 6. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-09/27/labour-party-journalism-licenses

This latest item, which follows, causes a very large dilemma. Morally and ethically which is right? It is clear, that one must try to report the news accurately to the best of your ability...but does that include breaking ethical and law codes to get, what might be a very important story, the news. Be prepared for a debate on the ethics of acquiring news. The last line.."only pedophiles require privacy" seems a stretch..would you want reporters video taping your honeymoon night? The last words you speak to your dying child,father,mother? November 29, 2011 British Inquiry Is Told Hacking Is Worthy Tool By SARAH LYALL LONDON — He admitted that he and his colleagues hacked into people’s phones and paid police officers for tips. He confessed to lurking in unmarked vans outside people’s houses, stealing confidential documents, rifling through celebrity garbage cans and pretending that he was not a journalist pursuing a story but “Brad the teenage rent boy,” propositioning a priest. After Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World tabloid, had finished his jaw-droppingly brazen remarks at a judicial inquiry on Tuesday, it was hard to think of any dubious news-gathering technique he had not confessed to, short of pistol-whipping sources for information. Nor were the practices he described limited to a select few, Mr. McMullan said in an afternoon of testimony at the Leveson Inquiry, which is investigating media ethics in Britain the wake of the summer’s phone hacking scandal. On the contrary, he said, The News of the World’s underlings were encouraged by their circulation-obsessed bosses to use any means necessary to get material. “We did all these things for our editors, for Rebekah Brooks and for Andy Coulson,” Mr. McMullan said, referring to two former News of the World editors who, he said, “should have had the strength of conviction to say, ‘Yes, sometimes you have to stray into black or gray illegal areas.’ ” He added: “They should have been the heroes of journalism, but they aren’t. They are the scum of journalism for trying to drop me and my colleagues in it.” Mr. Coulson, who resigned from his job as chief spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron in January, and Mrs. Brooks, who resigned in July from her job as chief executive of News International, the British newspaper arm of the Murdoch empire, have both been arrested on suspicion of phone hacking, or illegally intercepting voice mail messages. Mrs. Brooks, whom Mr. McMullan called “the archcriminal,” is also suspected of making illegal payments to the police. Both have repeatedly denied the allegations, and neither has yet been charged. Nothing that Mr. McMullan said was particularly surprising; anyone following the phone hacking scandal that engulfed News International and its parent, the News Corporation, over the summer is now more than familiar with outrageous tales of tabloid malfeasance. What was startling was that Mr. McMullan, who left his job in 2001, eagerly confessed to so much and on such a scale — no one else has done it quite this way — and that he maintained that none of it was wrong. Most people from the tabloid world have reacted to the revelations in the manner of Renault when discussing gambling in “Casablanca,” saying they are “shocked, shocked.” But Mr. McMullan veered so far in the other direction that at times he sounded like a satirist’s rendition of an amoral tabloid hack. Underhanded reporting techniques are not shocking at all, he said, particularly in light of how often he and his colleagues risked their lives in search of the truth. As examples of the dangers of his job, he described having cocaine-laced marijuana forced on him by knife-wielding drug dealers in a sting operation; being attacked by a crowd of murderous asylum seekers; and, in his “Brad the teenage rent boy” guise, sprinting through a convent dressed only in underpants to escape the pedophile priest he had successfully entrapped. “Phone hacking is a perfectly acceptable tool, given the sacrifices we make, if all we’re trying to do is get to the truth,” Mr. McMullan said, asking whether “we really want to live in a world where the only people who can do the hacking are MI5 and MI6.” No, he said, we do not. “For a brief period of about 20 years, we have actually lived in a free society where we can hack back,” he said. Journalists in Britain have traditionally justified shady practices by arguing that they are in “the public interest.” Asked by an inquiry lawyer how he would define that, Mr. McMullan said that the public interest is what the public is interested in. “I think the public is clever enough to decide the ethics of what it wants in its own newspapers,” he said. Referring to articles about Charlotte Church, a singer who told the inquiry this week of her distress at her family’s treatment by the tabloids, he said, “If they don’t like what you have written about Charlotte Church’s father having a three-in-a-bed with cocaine, then they won’t read it.” For all that, Mr. McMullan said that The News of the World had come to rely too much on outsiders to do work that could have easily been done by reporters, like conducting surveillance on potentially adulterous athletes. Also, he said, some of the investigators were incompetent. The year he became deputy features editor, he said, the department had a budget of £ 3.1 million — more than $4.5 million — to pay sources, buy stories and hire outsiders to find addresses, medical records and other information. “That was the joy of working for Murdoch,” he said. “They had that big pot of money.” Mr. McMullan, who now owns a pub and does occasional freelance work, spoke nostalgically of his tabloid career, seven years of it spent at The News of the World. He loved spiriting exclusive sources away “and hiding them from other journalists,” he said, as when he “spent two weeks locked in a hotel room with Princess Diana’s gym instructor in Amsterdam.” He also liked jumping in one of The News of the World’s stable of 12 cars and speeding away in pursuit of famous targets. “I absolutely loved giving chase to celebrities,” he said. “How many jobs can you have car chases in? Before Diana died, it was such good fun.” (Some celebrities liked it, too, he said. Brad Pitt “had a very positive attitude” about being pursued by crazed journalists in cars.) Mr. McMullan had brought along some illustrative materials, including a photograph of his surveillance van. He also briefly displayed a topless photograph of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy in The News of the World, apparently as a way to show how easy it is to obtain racy photographs. “That’s the president of France’s wife,” he said. “It’s a little early in the day for that, Mr. McMullan,” the inquiry lawyer said. Many witnesses at the Leveson Inquiry, especially victims of the tabloids, have called for a law to protect citizens from news media intrusion. Mr. McMullan said he thought that privacy was “evil,” in that it helps criminals cover up their misdeeds. Using a Britishism for “pedophile,” he said, “Privacy is for pedos.”

Here we go again, I have put some video jokes about journalism on my face book page yesterday and they are valid views of modern journalism. However on a much more important note there is this, and read my comment on the bottom:WikiLeaks wins major national Australian award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism. Assange: “Australian journalists are courageous, the Australian population is supportive, but Julia Gillard is a cowardly Australian Prime Minister. Assange awarded at Walkleys : World News Australia on SBS www.sbs.com.au WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been awarded for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism at the 2011 Walkley Awards. Assange, whose pre-recorded acceptance speech was played at the award ceremony held at Brisbane and broadcast on SBS ONE, blasted the US and Australian governments for their... Go to the source for the full version. I posted something about Assange on my facebook page the other day saying that ' I though he should get the Nobel Prize along with Obama (who already got one). And that is funny because I think that Assange should get his for the same reason, kind of, that Obama got his. Obama got his on a promising future. Assange should get his on what he has already done, and the real! irony of that is that Obama is persecuting him for that and his ,Obamas, promise seems to have disappeared. We should be able to take back the award to Obama and give it to Assagne.

Shot this by my Presentation groups and thought that 'what the hell' you guys could use the gift as well:Guy Kawasaki - 3:17 AM - Public (Fri06) My Black Friday special: Buy a copy of Enchantment (paper or ebook), get a free copy of Garr Reynolds's Presentation Zen, and I'll personalize the cover so Enchantment is a special gift. So you'll make enchanting presentations, and you can give an enchanting gift. Can you beat that? http://bit.ly/jxzBAA More photos from Guy Kawasaki - Comment - Share +31 11 shares - Ana Gabi Ledo, Billy Ventura, Candice Cendaña, Fabio Gam

The Randomness of History

This is a problem that has to be addressed, and what would be your thoughts here?:The Convoluted Life Cycle of a News Story | from the ok-let's-randomly-update-this-story dept. | posted by timothy on Sunday November 20, @16:26 (Social Networks) | with 56 comments | https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/11/20/2126237/the-convoluted-life-cycle-of-a-news-story?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [0]ideonexus writes "Once upon a time, newspapers were considered the "first draft of history." Today, rather than the daily episodic updates of major news stories developing a narrative over time, we have a perpetual stream of factoids from which a story emerges. Lauren Rabaino of mediabistro details this [1]new lifecycle of a newspaper story, from tweets to blog posts to an eventual print edition, and asks What are the best standards of practice? Should news sources provide a single web address with a stream of updates, post new blog entries that link to older ones, or should they adopt a Wiki approach to the news — revising a single story with a history of revisions available behind the scenes?" Discuss this story at: https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/11/20/2126237/the-convoluted-life-cycle-of-a-news-story?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting Links: 0. http://ideonexus.com/ 1. http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/the-new-convoluted-life-cycle-of-a-newspaper-story_b8552 Copyright 1997-2011, Geeknet, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This tid bit is from Forbes magazine about an article in the New Yorker and now third hand to you:TECH | 11/11/2011 @ 7:51AM |95 views How To Pick Which Stories To Tell 1 comments, 1 called-out + Comment now In the Nov. 14 issue of The New Yorker, John McPhee writes an essay on how and what he writes. One of the gems in the master’s piece, and it’s a good piece, is when he gives the what. How does he choose what to write about, of all the streaming possibilities? It’s the question always asked at readings. Many writers cringe when asked. But people demand to know because it must be some talismanic thing that separates the good storytellers from the bad ones. McPhee has a simple answer to end all answers: I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe twenty or thirty years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than ninety per cent. Beginner’s mind, people. Beginner’s mind. My Progression as a writer, by John McPhee (Nov. 14, 2011 New Yorker, reg required)

Good News

Continuing to follow another news media controversy that of news aggregators and local news companies competing here is the latest through Tech Review from MIT: Google News: Friend or Foe for Local News Services? Research suggests news aggregators like Google drive more traffic to local sites—but not their home pages. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2011BY ERICA NAONE Audio » Google has long been a favorite scapegoat of the troubled news industry. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch famously accused the search titan of stealing from media outlets by drawing users to its aggregation service, Google News, and away from those sites' home pages. New sites often dismiss Google's claims that it helps them by driving traffic to their articles. Now, early results from Microsoft Research New England suggest that news aggregators like Google News increase visits to local news sites—providing they highlight local news stories. The issue is particularly important at a time when many newspapers are trying to end the practice of giving away news for free. Like it or not, aggregators play a significant role. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, Google News is responsible for as much as 30 percent of the traffic that goes to the top 25 news sites. As such, it's a force that can't be ignored, and the Microsoft researchers wanted to assess how aggregators actually affect local news sites. Local news outlets have struggled, particularly online, an environment that's increasingly oriented toward a global audience. For every local news experiment, such as Steven Berlin Johnson's blog service Outside.in or AOL's Patch network, there seems to be another closed newspaper, such as the Honolulu Advertiser, or signs of trouble such as those that inspired the Christian Science Monitor to move to a mostly online format. Those local news experiments online haven't done very well to date. Johnson sold Outside.in to AOL for less than $10 million. Local news sites covered by Technology Review in the past, including YourStreet and Platial, have folded or suffered long-term financial difficulties. While many have theorized that the Internet ought to help local sites by making it easier to get their voices heard, in practice, sites have struggled to find a place—and business model—for themselves. But the Microsoft results suggest there is a hunger for local news online, according to senior researcher Markus Mobius, who was involved with the project. The researchers studied data going back to 2009, when Google gave French users the ability to enter geographic information to refine the results of searches done on Google News. The Microsoft researchers got their data from Microsoft's Bing toolbar, which asks users for permission to track data about online activity. The researchers used this information to study two groups—those who added location information and those who didn't. Besides this difference, the subjects lived in the same regions and had similar news habits before the change. For the group that added local results, the researchers found a huge initial spike in local news consumption, both in terms of page views and in time spent on local sites. Perhaps more interesting, once the spike stabilized, there was a lasting effect, Mobius notes. Eight weeks after the change, the researchers found there was a 16 percent increase in the number of unique local outlets that users visited. Their overall news consumption also went up, so the new interest in local news came as an addition to previous habits. 12 (AS YOU ALL SHOULD HAVE NOTED THIS BLOG IS MOSTLY A NEWS AGGREGATOR)

Set Up Journalism

Written stories, still photos and video all can be and are set up, often before hand, to fit a pre conceived idea of a news story:Behind the Scenes: How Conflict Photographs Come To Be | from the have-you-tried-throwing-left-handed? dept. | posted by timothy on Tuesday October 11, @11:43 (The Media) | with 141 comments | https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/10/11/1424224/behind-the-scenes-how-conflict-photographs-come-to-be?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First time accepted submitter benro03 writes "Airing photojournalism's dirty secret, Italian photographer Ruben Salvadori demonstrates how [0]conflict photography is often staged by the photographers themselves. He spent a significant amount of time in East Jerusalem studying the role that photojournalists play in what the world sees. Ruben is about to graduate with dual majors for a BA in International Relations and Anthropology/Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel." Some commenters on the linked story defend much of what's shown as ordinary aesthetic and editorial decisions; doubtless a parallel documentary could have been shot from a few hundred yards away with an opposite slant. Discuss this story at: https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/10/11/1424224/behind-the-scenes-how-conflict-photographs-come-to-be?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting Links: 0. http://www.petapixel.com/2011/10/04/an-eye-opening-look-at-how-many-conflict-photos-are-staged/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+PetaPixel+(PetaPixel)

This question of who should decide what is news continues. That problem of what we want to hear and see and what we need to hear and see. The challenge for a journalist is to decide what truly is important and what just light entertainment. The second challenge is after deciding, making that important news interesting, compelling even, for the consumer of that news. And so here again from the New York Times:Bits - Business, Innovation, Technology, Society September 29, 2011, 9:17 am Should Google Tweak the News We Consume? By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER Should Google play an editorial role in presenting readers with news? That question was a matter of debate at Zeitgeist, a Google conference this week in Paradise Valley, Ariz., where Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, said that Google had a responsibility to improve media. The question came up when Ted Koppel, the longtime broadcast journalist, complained that too much news was drivel, as reporters cover the Casey Anthony trial instead of life-and-death issues in Africa. People are being fed the news they want instead of the news they need because that makes news organizations money, he said. Nicholas Thompson, a senior editor at The New Yorker, then asked Mr. Koppel if Google should tweak its algorithm to deliver people the news they need instead of entertainment-as-news. “That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Mr. Koppel said. To be clear, Google has said many times that its algorithm presents users with the most relevant search results and does not exercise editorial control, so the question is likely to remain no more than a matter of debate. It reiterated that this week, after Rick Santorum said he thought Google should remove a dirty joke that showed up in searches for his last name. Still, Mr. Page said that Google could do a better job of getting people to focus on certain issues, though he did not address Mr. Koppel’s statement directly. “I see this as our responsibility to some extent, trying to improve media,” Mr. Page said. “If you ask anyone about how that information’s going to be propagated, what you’re going to focus on, I think it could work a lot better than it does now.” “We as an Internet community, we have a responsibility to make those things work a lot better and get people focused on what are the real issues, what should you be thinking about,” he said. “And I think we as a whole are not doing a good job of that at all.” Google has taken small steps toward editing search results for content. In February, for example, it changed its algorithm to weed out Web sites that it thinks have subpar articles and videos, like content farms, a move that affected 12 percent of search queries.

Here is some really good advice from the front lines. The New York Times gives suggestions to editors:October 4, 2011, 10:46 am The Reader’s Lament By PHILIP B. CORBETT Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style. (Some frequently asked questions are here.) AfterDeadline Times readers expect nothing but the best in our writing and editing. Too often, they’re disappointed. My colleague Patrick LaForge, who oversees our copy desks, described their dismay and offered some suggestions in this memo to editors: ••• Day after day, devoted Times readers are moved to complain. “As a 35-year subscriber to The Times, I continue to be disappointed in the number of typos that have become chronic and, sorry to say, expected on a daily basis,” one reader wrote recently. “Where are the proofreaders and editors? Where are the standards for punctuation and grammar? The Times used to be the gold standard.” Mistakes in copy have been a problem since Gutenberg, but it is hard to shake the impression that we have been slipping more than usual, especially in articles that are rushed onto the Web site, bypassing some of our traditional steps. Yes, speed is important in the modern news competition. But readers still have high expectations, especially now that they are paying for online news. We get letters, e-mails, phone calls and complaints on Twitter. Readers have even been known to buttonhole editors on elevators, at cocktail parties and in the local bodega. We often respond, apologizing for our lapses and promising to spread the word. But it is hard to ease the distress of readers like the one who wrote on Sept. 14 to complain about the phrase “committee that overseas foreign aid.” Readers expect a great degree of care in any copy published under our name, wherever it appears — on the front page or an inside page in print; on the home page or deep in a small blog; on a mobile app or in a summary on Facebook. They get annoyed at typos, usage errors and factual mistakes even when we are obviously breaking our backs to get the news to them first. Sure, they can figure it out when we refer to “John G. Borehner,” as we did recently, but they get irritated. “I’ve read The Times daily for more years than I can remember,” one wrote recently. “It goes without saying that it’s the best newspaper in the world. That said, is it irony or just coincidence that now that I’m ‘subscribing’ to the paper’s digital version, the number of glaring copy-editing errors is greater than ever?” This era of news publishing has put a greater emphasis on speed, across multiple formats and platforms. Thanks to blogging and continuous updates, more people in the newsroom find themselves in the role of publishing live material. The same forces have increased the workload and distractions faced by reporters, backfield editors, copy editors and producers. It can be tempting to cut corners. You might decide, unwisely, to save some time by bypassing the copy desk. There is rarely a justification for doing so. Our policy is for every article to get at least two reads, preferably one of them by an experienced copy editor, before publication. And then you should check your work again, or have someone else check it. ••• Here are some proofreading tips culled from years of journalism tip sheets: • Break your mind-set: Read the copy out loud. Read it silently, one word at a time. Read it backward and focus on the spelling of words. Print a copy. Preview it in a different application. Change the format or the screen resolution. Justify or unjustify the type. Take a break and return to it with fresh eyes. • Use spelling checkers but don’t trust them. In particular, be aware of homophone confusion: complement and compliment, accept and except, effect and affect, oversees and overseas. • Memorize frequently misspelled and misused words. Here’s a list: http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/misspelled.html. • Beware of contractions and apostrophes: their and they’re, its and it’s, your and you’re. • After reading for content and spelling, proofread separately for punctuation. • Beware of doubled words at the end and start of a line. A doubled “that” will often slip right by if you let it. • Double-check proper names and claims of distinction (first, best, oldest, tallest, etc.). • Double-check little words that are often interchanged: or, of; it, is. • Check all the numbers, especially any reference to millions, billions or trillions. Do the math. Do the math again. • Set aside a regular time to review stylebook and usage rules. This includes backfield editors and reporters. If you don’t want someone to change your story on style grounds (and perhaps introduce an error), learn the basics and follow them. • Be aware of dates and days of the week, especially in advance copy or copy that has been held. Be aware of references to next month/last month around the time the month is changing. • Make a personal checklist of the things you tend to miss. Use it on every story. • Have someone else, preferably a copy editor, read behind you. Last of all, think of our readers — and care what they think of us. In a Word This week’s grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers. ••• One upon a time, the only thing that traveled faster than the speed of light was gossip. Try proofreading one word at a time. ••• LOS ANGELES — DreamWorks Animation, the company behind successful movie franchises like “Madagascar” and “Shrek,” said it had completed a deal to pump its films and television specials through Netflix, replacing a less lucrative pact with HBO. A past-tense lead sentence like this should include a time element. ••• Although political activists celebrated the change, they also cautioned how deep it would go and how fast, given that the king referred to the next election cycle, which would not be until 2015. This construction doesn’t work with “caution,” which as a verb is equivalent to “warn.” ••• Yet officials revealed this week that the State Education Department had quietly been conducting erasure analysis on some high school Regents exams for more than three years, a process that red-flagged 64 incidences of possible problems, including one that led to the ouster of an assistant principal in the Bronx. In precise usage, “incidence” means rate or prevalence: “Officials detected a high incidence of cheating.” Here, we wanted “incidents,” meaning specific occurrences. ••• He accepted a hearty handshake from Girardi, who often has received a snarl from Burnett along with the ball. Here’s what the stylebook says: adverb placement. In fluid writing, an adverb used with a compound verb should normally be placed between parts of the verb (the way normally is, a few words back in this sentence, and the way usually is, in the next example): He will usually take the opposing side. A similar rule applies when a verb like is links a noun to its modifier: Refundable fares are often expensive (not often are expensive). ••• Like Mr. McCain, Mr. Perry refused to back down, declaring that if someone opposes the policy, “I don’t think you have a heart.” And like they did to Mr. McCain, the audience quickly turned against Mr. Perry, loudly booing his position on the issue and his refusal to give an inch. “Like” is correctly used as a preposition in the first sentence, but incorrectly used as a conjunction in the second. Make it “And as they did …” ••• For the record, Octopoteuthis is the first among the spineless masses of invertebrates known to mate equally with males and females, Hendrik J.T. Hoving and two colleagues report in their paper, “A shot in the dark: same-sex squid behavior in a deep-sea squid,” published, lurid title and all, in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biology Letters. We capitalize the principal words in the title of an article. ••• The kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard filed a complaint for damages against the federal government on Thursday, charging that its parole agents did not adequately monitor Phillip Garrido, a convicted sex offender who was on federal parole when he abducted Ms. Dugard in 1991. The stylebook is clear on this point: Use kidnapping (never kidnap, even in headlines) for the noun and the modifier, to avoid a headlinese flavor. ••• In their third debate in as many weeks, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas engaged in a sometimes heated back and forth over immigration, health care and entitlements, their rivalry dominating a stage that included seven other candidates struggling to catch up in the race for Republican presidential nomination. Another point the stylebook is clear on: in as many. Avoid this journalese mannerism: This was the second case in as many weeks. As many as second? No. Make it the second case in two weeks. ••• His conviction came after testimony by some witnesses who later recanted and on the scantest of physical evidence, adding fuel to those who rely on the Internet to rally against executions and to question the validity of eyewitness identification and of the court system itself. We seemed to have our metaphors (or clichés) crossed here. You might add fuel to the fire (of a controversy), but you would not add fuel to the people rallying against executions. ••• As with a jigsaw puzzle, forensic anthropologists are putting together more pieces of this intense investigation, but a clear picture of the person, or people, responsible for the murders is still frustratingly unclear. Maybe this was a revision gone awry, or perhaps the writer just lost track of the sentence. But we didn’t want to say “a clear picture … is still frustratingly unclear.” ••• Whether the taxes on the rich in Europe raise enough money to close much of their budget shortfalls, they are being promoted as a step toward economic fairness at a time when governments are cutting spending on social programs like pensions, health care and education. As I’ve pointed out before, sometimes “whether” works alone, but sometimes it needs “or not.” A rule of thumb: “or not” is necessary if we mean “regardless of whether,” as we did here. ••• Mr. Cantor also recalled the conversation concerning the $50 million, and the prime minister’s support for it, and said that further monies from Congress would be “colored greatly by the Palestinians’ actions at the U.N.” No real need for the plural here, and in any case our preferred spelling is “moneys.” ••• Such rides are notoriously uncomfortable, but the Green Lantern, like its superhero namesake, comes with a little extra padding. As we’ve noted before, “namesake” (unlike “eponym”) generally refers to the receiver of the shared name, not to the giver. ••• After Deadline examines questions of grammar, usage and style encountered by writers and editors of The Times. It is adapted from a weekly newsroom critique overseen by Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, who is also in charge of The Times’s style manual.

This could become a very big problem in the future. As reported in the New York Times:September 29, 2011, 9:17 am
Should Google Tweak the News We Consume?
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Should Google play an editorial role in presenting readers with news?

That question was a matter of debate at Zeitgeist, a Google conference this week in Paradise Valley, Ariz., where Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, said that Google had a responsibility to improve media.

The question came up when Ted Koppel, the longtime broadcast journalist, complained that too much news was drivel, as reporters cover the Casey Anthony trial instead of life-and-death issues in Africa. People are being fed the news they want instead of the news they need because that makes news organizations money, he said.

Nicholas Thompson, a senior editor at The New Yorker, then asked Mr. Koppel if Google should tweak its algorithm to deliver people the news they need instead of entertainment-as-news.

“That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Mr. Koppel said.

To be clear, Google has said many times that its algorithm presents users with the most relevant search results and does not exercise editorial control, so the question is likely to remain no more than a matter of debate. It reiterated that this week, after Rick Santorum said he thought Google should remove a dirty joke that showed up in searches for his last name.

Still, Mr. Page said that Google could do a better job of getting people to focus on certain issues, though he did not address Mr. Koppel’s statement directly.

“I see this as our responsibility to some extent, trying to improve media,” Mr. Page said. “If you ask anyone about how that information’s going to be propagated, what you’re going to focus on, I think it could work a lot better than it does now.”

“We as an Internet community, we have a responsibility to make those things work a lot better and get people focused on what are the real issues, what should you be thinking about,” he said. “And I think we as a whole are not doing a good job of that at all.”

Google has taken small steps toward editing search results for content. In February, for example, it changed its algorithm to weed out Web sites that it thinks have subpar articles and videos, like content farms, a move that affected 12 percent of search queries.

Here is a story copied from Slashdot:Walmart Goes Solar In California
| from the price-drop-on-the-sun dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 21, @19:29 (Power)
| with 138 comments
| https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/21/2246205/Walmart-Goes-Solar-In-California?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------WHAT HAS THIS STORY NOT SAID?? THAT IS THE NEWS!

[0]tekgoblin writes "Walmart today has announced that it plans to
[1]install solar panels on more than 75 percent of its stores in the
state. From the article: 'When completed, Walmart’s solar commitment in
California is expected to generate up to 70 million kilowatt hours of
clean, renewable energy per year, which is equal to powering more than
5,400 homes. It will also avoid producing more than 21,700 metric tons of
carbon dioxide emissions per year, which is equal to 4,100 cars off the
road and provide 20 to 30 percent of each facility’s total electric
needs.'"
What is remarkable about this....? Well what should be said that isn't. The reporter has not carried through. Solar will provide 20-30% which at the 20% level leaves 80% not solar. So 4 times 4,100 cars is 16,400 and 4 times 21,700= 86,800 and finally 4 times 5,400 homes equals 21,600 homes. So you see that Walmart here has done a really wonderful job of reducing their eco footprint by 20 to 30 percent they have also told us just how much they will still be polluting.Don't get on them who out their is doing nothing and polluting more? That is the story to chase.

Well if any of you find yourself working in Journalism over the next few years here is your likely competition:September 10, 2011
In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
By STEVE LOHR

“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 ... . ”

Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.

The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning.

The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the company’s founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.

“I thought it was magic,” says Roger Lee, a general partner of Battery Ventures, which led a $6 million investment in the company earlier this year. “It’s as if a human wrote it.”

Experts in artificial intelligence and language are also impressed, if less enthralled. Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, says, “The quality of the narrative produced was quite good,” as if written by a human, if not an accomplished wordsmith. Narrative Science, Mr. Etzioni says, points to a larger trend in computing of “the increasing sophistication in automatic language understanding and, now, language generation.”

The innovative work at Narrative Science raises the broader issue of whether such applications of artificial intelligence will mainly assist human workers or replace them. Technology is already undermining the economics of traditional journalism. Online advertising, while on the rise, has not offset the decline in print advertising. But will “robot journalists” replace flesh-and-blood journalists in newsrooms?

The leaders of Narrative Science emphasized that their technology would be primarily a low-cost tool for publications to expand and enrich coverage when editorial budgets are under pressure. The company, founded last year, has 20 customers so far. Several are still experimenting with the technology, and Stuart Frankel, the chief executive of Narrative Science, wouldn’t name them. They include newspaper chains seeking to offer automated summary articles for more extensive coverage of local youth sports and to generate articles about the quarterly financial results of local public companies.

“Mostly, we’re doing things that are not being done otherwise,” Mr. Frankel says.

The Narrative Science customers that are willing to talk do fit that model. The Big Ten Network, a joint venture of the Big Ten Conference and Fox Networks, began using the technology in the spring of 2010 for short recaps of baseball and softball games. They were posted on the network’s Web site within a minute or two of the end of each game; box scores and play-by-play data were used to generate the brief articles. (Previously, the network relied on online summaries provided by university sports offices.)

As the spring sports season progressed, the computer-generated articles improved, helped by suggestions from editors on the network’s staff, says Michael Calderon, vice president for digital and interactive media at the Big Ten Network.

The Narrative Science software can make inferences based on the historical data it collects and the sequence and outcomes of past games. To generate story “angles,” explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science, the software learns concepts for articles like “individual effort,” “team effort,” “come from behind,” “back and forth,” “season high,” “player’s streak” and “rankings for team.” Then the software decides what element is most important for that game, and it becomes the lead of the article, he said. The data also determines vocabulary selection. A lopsided score may well be termed a “rout” rather than a “win.”

“Composition is the key concept,” Mr. Hammond says. “This is not just taking data and spilling it over into text.”

Last fall, the Big Ten Network began using Narrative Science for updates of football and basketball games. Those reports helped drive a surge in referrals to the Web site from Google’s search algorithm, which highly ranks new content on popular subjects, Mr. Calderon says. The network’s Web traffic for football games last season was 40 percent higher than in 2009.

Hanley Wood, a trade publisher for the construction industry, began using the program in August to provide monthly reports on more than 350 local housing markets, posted on its site, builderonline.com. The company had long collected the data, but hiring people to write trend articles would have been too costly, says Andrew Reid, president of Hanley Wood’s digital media and market intelligence unit.

Mr. Reid says Hanley Wood worked with Narrative Science for months to fine-tune the software for construction. A former executive at Thomson Reuters, he says he was struck by the high quality of the articles.

“They got over a big linguistic hurdle,” he observes. “The stories are not duplicates by any means.”

He was also impressed by the cost. Hanley Wood pays Narrative Science less than $10 for each article of about 500 words — and the price will very likely decline over time. Even at $10, the cost is far less, by industry estimates, than the average cost per article of local online news ventures like AOL’s Patch or answer sites, like those run by Demand Media.

NARRATIVE SCIENCE’S ambitions include moving further up the ladder of quality. Both Mr. Birnbaum and Mr. Hammond are professors of journalism as well as computer science. The company itself is an outgrowth of collaboration between the two schools.

“This kind of technology can deepen journalism,” says John Lavine, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern.

Mr. Hammond says the combination of advances in its writing engine and data mining can open new horizons for computer journalism, exploring “correlations that you did not expect” — conceptually similar to “Freakonomics,” by two humans, the economist Steven D. Levitt and the author Stephen J. Dubner.

Mr. Hammond cited a media maven’s prediction that a computer program might win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 20 years — and he begged to differ.

“In five years,” he says, “a computer program will win a Pulitzer Prize — and I’ll be damned if it’s not our technology.”

Should it happen, the prize, of course, would not be awarded to abstract code, but to its human creators.

Science Journalism is specialized genre and reporters should have a good grounding in the sciences. They should also realize that scientists also make silly and stupid mistakes and watch for them. Here is a good example:Instant Cosmic Classic' Supernova Discovered
| from the transfixed-by-distant-lights dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Friday August 26, @08:52 (Space)
| with 138 comments
| https://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/26/1236202/Instant-Cosmic-Classic-Supernova-Discovered?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

chill sends this quote from a news release by the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory: "A [0]supernova discovered yesterday is closer to
Earth — approximately 21 million light-years away—than any other of its
kind in a generation. Astronomers believe they [1]caught the supernova
within hours of its explosion, a rare feat made possible with a
specialized survey telescope and state-of-the-art computational tools.
'We caught this supernova very soon after explosion. PTF 11kly is getting
brighter by the minute. It’s already 20 times brighter than it was
yesterday,' said Peter Nugent, the senior scientist at Berkeley Lab who
first spotted the supernova. ... the supernova is still getting brighter,
and might even be visible with good binoculars in ten days’ time,
appearing brighter than any other supernova of its type in the last 30
years."

Discuss this story at:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/26/1236202/Instant-Cosmic-Classic-Supernova-Discovered?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2011/08/25/supernova/
1. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/25/astroalert-type-ia-supernova-in-m101/
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS REPORT? OUR SCIENCE DISCOVERER TELLS US THAT THEY DISCOVERED THE EXPLOSION WITHIN HOURS OF IT HAPPENING. DUH! HOW DID THEY GET 21 MILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY AND BACK AGAIN TO TELL US THIS IN LESS THEN A WEEK? THESE GUYS ARE SO WARPED THEY THINK THAT THEY HAVE A SPECIAL WARP DRIVE AND ARE NOT AFFECTED BY THE LIMITS OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT NOR TIME NOR ANYTHING. TRULY SOMEONE YOU SHOULD BE VERY CAREFUL CREDITING AND QUOTING.

Wow, can you believe it good news! And it's from the news broadcasting industry. This has been happening for some time with print papers in small local markets. I love the 4th paragraph were they state that the station is hiring broadcasters and in some cases employees. Ummm aren't broadcasters employees? Anyway here is the full story from the New York Times:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/business/media/newly-flush-local-tv-newscasts-are-expanding.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha25

Local TV Newscasts Expanding
Tim Parker for The New York Times

Leisa Zigman, an anchor at KSDK, which will begin newscasts as early as 4 a.m. next month.
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: August 21, 2011

ST. LOUIS — Coming soon to this city’s television screens: more news at 4 in the morning, again at 10, and at 4 in the afternoon.
Enlarge This Image
Tim Parker for The New York Times

Casey Nolan of KSDK in St. Louis setting up a location shot.

KSDK, the local NBC affiliate, is adding newscasts to those time slots next month, giving it six and a half hours of local news each weekday, its highest count to date.

As in many other markets, the news is starting earlier than ever in the morning, and replacing “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in the afternoon. To supply it in St. Louis, KSDK is hiring 10 people and buying new cameras and trucks.

This is what the rebound in local television looks like. Three years after the business buckled under the weight of the advertising recession, the more popular stations in markets like St. Louis are adding newscasts and in some cases employees — though not as many as were dismissed during the downturn.

Station economics affect the nation’s news diet because local TV news is consistently identified in surveys as the top news source for most Americans.

A study commissioned by the Federal Communications Commission concluded earlier this year that although there were pockets of excellence in local news, there was still a heavy reliance on thinly stretched staffs and predictable crime and weather coverage.

Three trends have benefited the local station business. First, advertisers have streamed back, especially in the automotive sector that is so important to local media.

Steve Ridge of Frank N. Magid Associates, which consults with local stations nationwide, said local TV ad revenues were up almost 25 percent in 2010 compared with 2009, buttressed by political ad spending. So far this year, even without political ads, the owners of several big groups of stations reported slight upticks in ad revenues versus 2010.

Second, cable and satellite companies have agreed in many cases to pay retransmission fees to stations, and bigger stations in local markets can command bigger fees. Even though stations are splitting those fees with their network partners, like NBC and ABC, they “really have been an infusion of stability,” Mr. Ridge said.

Third, the downturn became a rationale not only to cut costs but to innovate and experiment within news divisions, which have historically been profit centers for stations. The benefit of the industry’s bad times, executives say, is that it forced a hard look at news operations.

“Our view was that local broadcasting had gone on autopilot,” said Dave Lougee, the president of Gannett Broadcasting, which owns KSDK. Industrywide, he said, newscasts had “become sort of commoditized and formulaic — arguably in many cases irrelevant.”

Lynn Beall, the president and general manager of KSDK, said the turbulence “helped us put our focus more on the customer.” KSDK’s anchors and reporters now interact with some of those customers on Facebook and Twitter, making them more aware of community interests. Some of KSDK’s newscasts now include commentary segments. And perhaps most important, many employees have been trained to be what Gannett calls multimedia journalists, also known as one-man bands, able to record, produce and report pieces from start to finish.

“We have more people gathering content than we did a year ago, because more people are trained on more platforms,” Ms. Beall said.

Such arrangements have been a source of grumbling for TV journalists for years, but for those who have never experienced the old way — a reporter, a videographer and sometimes a producer and a sound technician — the new way is more acceptable, and sometimes even preferable.

Some of the changes, Ms. Beall acknowledged, were born out of necessity. During the recession, employees at KSDK were furloughed; at other stations across the country, longtime reporters and anchors were ushered out. Gannett consolidated the graphics and master control operations of its stations to a centralized location, eliminating more workers.

Now, Mr. Lougee said, with “the cost of technology coming down while the quality is going up,” stations have steered a greater percentage of their staffs toward producing content.

It is clear that investments are being made selectively. Because weather is consistently identified as the most important part of local newscasts, KSDK recently hired a fifth full-time member of its weather team and is adding dashboard cameras to its trucks to transmit live video via the Internet during severe weather.

The macroeconomic landscape for stations is still unsettled given the splintering television audience and the emerging Internet sources for news and entertainment that undermine the concept of a one-to-many broadcast. Uncertainty abounds about the reassignment of broadcast spectrum from television to new wireless uses.

But for now, some stations can still draw big audiences, both on TV and increasingly to their Web sites. A period of station buying and selling is anticipated by industry analysts this year, as shown by McGraw-Hill, which put its four full-power stations up for sale earlier this summer.

The rebound has not treated all stations equally. Mr. Ridge said he sensed that the downturn and the measured recovery since then “widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”

“The stronger stations are now poised to really dominate in these markets, and the smaller stations are now less able to compete, because all around, the economics are not working for them,” he said.

That manifests itself in so-called shared-services agreements, in which one station in a market runs part or all of another station. The Communications Workers of America union said last year that it had identified at least 25 local markets where such outsourcing agreements were in place, and criticized them for reducing journalistic competition and “the diversity of local voices in a community.”

In St. Louis, KSDK is now paid to produce two newscasts a day for KDNL, the city’s ABC affiliate, which is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. KDNL had stopped producing its own newscasts nearly a decade ago; Ms. Beall characterized the work as a partnership.

Employees at local stations, for the most part, are not getting much breathing room. Bob Papper, a Hofstra University professor who surveys local television staffs, found a gain of 750 jobs in 2010, which made up for the 400 lost jobs in 2009, but made only a small dent in the 1,200 lost jobs in 2008.

At the same time, “the average amount of news went up 18 minutes per weekday in 2010,” he said via e-mail, adding, “I suspect we could see an even bigger jump in 2011.”

That is in part because of the shake-up in the syndication market. Without Ms. Winfrey’s show, KSDK is spending less on syndication, Mr. Lougee said; now it has more to spend on news.

Getting the news is what a reporters life is about, mostly. The hows and where fors are now front page news. If I read the following correctly we have here a conspiracy to to commit a crime and racketeering both crimes which have in the past resulted in very long prison sentences. What do you think?


Clive Goodman, suspended News of The World royal correspondent, arrives at the City of Westminster Magistrates Court in central London in this August 16, 2006 file photo. REUTERS/Alessia Pierdomenico/Files

By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON | Fri Aug 19, 2011 1:49pm EDT

(Reuters) - Executives at Rupert Murdoch's UK-based News International are concerned that emails discussing questionable payments made to police by the News of the World may prove more problematic than those that discuss phone hacking, sources familiar with investigations into the shuttered tabloid's reporting practices said.

There are growing concerns inside the company that evidence of questionable payments to police -- or other British public officials -- could fuel investigations by U.S. authorities into possible breaches of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), an American law that prohibits corrupt payments to foreign government officials. News International is owned by New York-based News Corp (NWSA.O).

"We're more frightened by the (U.S. Justice Department) than we are of Scotland Yard," a source close to News Corp who was briefed about the content of the emails told Reuters. "All Scotland Yard can go after is News International but the Justice Department can go after all of News Corporation."

Thousands of News of the World emails were assembled in 2007 when News International executives and lawyers at an outside firm were preparing responses to a litigation threat lodged by Clive Goodman, a former reporter for the News of the World, who was jailed for hacking into voicemail messages of aides to Britain's Royal family.

The emails sat ignored for years in the archives of London law firm Harbottle & Lewis. News International retrieved them earlier this year and showed them to Ken MacDonald, a former Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales and a member of the House of Lords. MacDonald recently told Parliament that after he read the messages in May, it had taken him "about three minutes, maybe five minutes" to determine that they contained evidence of possible criminality.

The company subsequently turned over the e-mails to London's Metropolitan police, who shortly after receiving them set up a team to investigate payments to police officers. The company later authorized Harbottle & Lewis to cooperate with parliamentary and police investigators.

While much has been made of emails related to the phone hacking scandal, which since July has sparked a flurry of resignations within the company and Scotland Yard, some at News International are more worried by emails referring to payments to police.

The source close to News Corp said lawyers hired by News International were soon expected to question journalists at more than one of Murdoch's British publications about possible payments to both UK police officers and other British public officials.

Last month News Corp hired Mark Mendelsohn, who served as the deputy chief of the Fraud Section in the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). Mendelsohn is internationally acknowledged and respected as the architect and key enforcement official of the DOJ's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement program.

Reuters is a competitor of Dow Jones Newswires, the financial news agency that News International's New York-based parent company News Corp acquired along with the Wall Street Journal in 2007.

GREEN BOOK

The source close to News Corp said the email traffic indicates Goodman and the then-editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, agreed that an unnamed police contact should receive a "four-figure sum" for leaking a confidential file known as the "green book" containing information about the movements, locations and phone numbers of members of the royal family.

The source said the dossier held by Harbottle & Lewis also included financial records showing the precise amount mentioned in the e-mail traffic was paid out in cash. The payment was made on or about the same day of the alleged e-mail exchange, to a recipient who used a pseudonym.

The source, and a second source briefed on the matter, said the evidence available to News International now indicates that neither the paper nor its outside lawyers sought to review the archived evidence relating to police corruption, or to further examine its content, between the time the material was sent to storage in 2008 and its retrieval earlier this year.

A spokeswoman for News International said she could not discuss the emails or how the company handled them due to a continuing investigation by British police.

Harbottle & Lewis says it has been asked by police to not make public the emails' contents "to preserve the integrity of their criminal investigation."

Thursday, parliamentary officials were expected to ask News International to authorize Burton Copeland, a second outside law firm retained by the publisher, to help the company look into questionable practices, the source close to News Corp told Reuters.

"LARGE NUMBER OF EMAILS"

In February, 2007, not long after Goodman pleaded guilty to phone hacking charges, Les Hinton, then News International's executive chairman, wrote to Goodman to fire him, according to documents made public Tuesday by a parliamentary committee.

A month later, Goodman sent a letter to News International's human resources director appealing his sacking. In it, Goodman claimed his activities were carried out with "full knowledge" of other executives at the paper. Goodman noted that even after he was jailed, the News of the World "continued to employ me for a substantial part of my custodial sentence."

As a result of Goodman's claims, the company launched both an internal review of relevant evidence -- by News International's human resources and legal affairs directors -- and a further review by Harbottle & Lewis.

In a submission to parliament, Jon Chapman, News International legal director in 2007, said he and personnel chief Daniel Cloke went through a "large number of emails" to try to determine whether a "limited and specified number of individuals" knew about Goodman's involvement in phone hacking. They found "no such evidence," Chapman said. He said Hinton subsequently asked that outside lawyers review the same emails looking for the same kind of evidence.

In its submission to Parliament, Harbottle & Lewis said News International asked the firm to look through five batches of News of the World emails for evidence that certain individuals knew of Goodman's involvement in phone hacking or that other journalists were involved in phone hacking.

The law firm emphasized it "was not retained to look for evidence of wider criminal activities and did not do so," and said it was only "being asked to assist News International in dealing with Mr. Goodman's internal appeal against his dismissal."

The law firm said the e-mails it collected were shipped to an outside storage company in November 2008 and were not retrieved until March 25 of this year, when the firm reached into its archives at the request of News International lawyers.

(Editing by Martin Howell, Simon Robinson and Sara Ledwith)

The evolution of Journalism quickens. Wikileaks dramatically revealed the weakness of our present day corporation owned and controlled media. Murdocs News group revealed the problems that occur when an established news organization tries to obtain news the same illegal way the the wiki boys did. Another thing to consider is what sort of news did these two different organizations reveal? With Wikileaks it seems we are given news we need to know but don't necessarily want to know. Were as in the latter case we get news (entertainment) we like to here but do not need to know. That is private, personal and sometimes tragic revelations revealed. So here from the New York Times:
July 28, 2011
In Baring Facts of Train Crash, Blogs Erode China Censorship
By MICHAEL WINES and SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — “After all the wind and storm, what’s going on with the high-speed train?” read the prophetic message posted last Saturday evening on the Chinese microblog Sina Weibo. “It’s crawling slower than a snail. I hope nothing happens to it.”

They were a few short sentences, typed by a young girl with the online handle Smm Miao. But five days later, the torrent that followed them was still flooding this nation’s Internet, and lapping at the feet of government bureaucrats, censors and the state-controlled press.

The train the girl saw, on a track outside Wenzhou in coastal Zhejiang Province, was rammed from behind minutes later, killing 39 people and injuring 192. Since then, China’s two major Twitter-like microblogs — called weibos here — have posted an astounding 26 million messages on the tragedy, including some that have forced embarrassed officials to reverse themselves. The messages are a potent amalgam of contempt for railway authorities, suspicion of government explanations and shoe-leather journalism by citizens and professionals alike.

The swift and comprehensive blogs on the train accident stood this week in stark contrast to the stonewalling of the Railways Ministry, already stained by a bribery scandal. And they are a humbling example for the Communist Party news outlets and state television, whose blinkered coverage of rescued babies only belatedly gave way to careful reports on the public’s discontent.

While the blogs have exposed wrongdoers and broken news before, this week’s performance may signal the arrival of weibos as a social force to be reckoned with, even in the face of government efforts to rein in the Internet’s influence.

The government censors assigned to monitor public opinion have let most, though hardly all of the weibo posts stream onto the Web unimpeded. But many experts say they are riding a tiger. For the very nature of weibo posts, which spread faster than censors can react, makes weibos beyond easy control. And their mushrooming popularity makes controlling them a delicate matter.

Saturday’s train disaster is a telling example — an event that resonated with China’s growing middle class, computer-savvy, able to afford travel by high-speed rail, already deeply skeptical of official propaganda.

As state television devoted Saturday evening to reports of mass murder in Norway, Sina Weibo weighed in four minutes after the train accident with a post from the crash scene, by a passenger reporting a power blackout and “two strong collisions.” Nine minutes later, another passenger posted a call for help, reposted 100,000 times: “Children are crying all over the train car! Not a single attendant here!” Two hours later, a call for blood quickly clogged local hospitals with donors.

Then the reaction began to pour in. “Such a major accident, how could it be attributed to weather and technical reasons?” blogged Cai Qi, a senior Zhejiang Province official. “Who should take the responsibility? The railway department should think hard in this time of pain and learn a good lesson from this.”

From a Hubei Province blogger: “I just watched the news on the train crash in Wenzhou, but I feel like I still don’t even know what happened. Nothing is reliable anymore. I feel like I can’t even believe the weather forecast. Is there anything that we can still trust?”

There is no clearer sign of the rising influence of microblogs than their impact on government itself.

Last weekend, Wenzhou bureaucrats ordered local lawyers not to accept cases from families of victims without their permission. After weibos exposed them, they withdrew the order and apologized.

Railway workers had quickly buried the first car of the oncoming train at the site of the accident. On Monday, after an online outcry charging a cover-up, they unearthed it and took it to Wenzhou for analysis. China Daily, the state-controlled English-language newspaper, noted that they had met the request of “many netizens.”

“I call it the microblogging revolution,” Zhan Jiang, a professor of international journalism and communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said in an interview on Thursday. “In the last year, microbloggers, especially Sina and Tencent, have played more and more a major role in coverage, especially breaking news.”

The few newspapers and magazines here that consistently push back at censors with investigative journalism are not just printing the results of their digging into the train wreck, but posting them on weibos for millions to see. So were hundreds of more traditional state-controlled news outlets.

Even the Communist Party organ People’s Daily maintains a weibo. But the field is dominated by two players. Sina Holdings Ltd.’s Sina Weibo (pronounced SEE-nah WAY-bo) counts 140 million users, generally better-educated and more interested in current events than those at competitors. Tencent Inc.’s weibo hosts 200 million generally younger users who are more interested in socializing.

In some ways, the Chinese weibos replicate their Western counterparts: they limit posts to 140 characters (though in Chinese, where many characters are words by themselves, much more can be said). Posts can be re-tweeted, too, although in China, tweeting is called knitting, because the word “weibo” sounds like the word for scarf.

There are also differences. Bloggers can comment on others’ posts, turning a message into a conversation. Users also can include photographs and other files with their posts, to telling effect: on Thursday, fact-checking bloggers posted photos of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s recent official activities to counter his assertion at a Wenzhou news conference that illness had kept him from visiting the disaster site earlier.

While Western social networks like Twitter and Facebook are blocked here, their Chinese counterparts thrive, largely because their owners consent to government monitoring and censorship — and perhaps because the government fears the reaction should it shut them down. The outpouring over the rail tragedy appears to have enjoyed at least some official approval; many analysts believe the government sees microblogs as a virtual steam valve through which citizens can safely vent complaints.

If needed, the weibos have literally dozens of electronic levers they can press to dilute, hide or delete offending posts, according to one Tencent Web editor who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of dismissal in disclosing that information. Yet the weibos also play cat and mouse with the censors.

“If we did not have any free speech then this company would not have any influence, so the company must act proactively to safeguard our space,” he said. “So that’s why they must go through this process of bargaining with the government departments.”

And even dedicated censors find the weibos hard to restrain. Government minders can electronically delete posts with offending keywords like “human rights” and “protest.” But like Twitter, the ability to instantly forward posts to dozens of fellow users means that messages can spread, well before censorship orders can be implemented.

And there are always screenshots to preserve posts that are deleted, such as this one by Ge You, one of China’s most distinguished actors:

“If a higher-level leader died,” he wrote, “there would be countless wreaths; however, when many ordinary people died, there was only endless harmony” — a euphemism for censorship. “If a higher-level leader died, there would be nationwide mourning; however, when many ordinary people died, there was not a single word of apology. If a higher-level leader died, there would be high-end funerals; however, when many ordinary people died, there were only cold numbers.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Adam Century, Li Mia, Li Bibo and Edy Lin contributed research.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
back to me
So in our "free and open society" we still have cover ups and in repressed dictatorships we still have freedom of expression despite censorship all through this wonderful internet and www. I wish George Orwell was here to see it. He would have loved (hated) the cameras in England as something he predicted for the USSR rather then his home country, although as a former civil servant he understood that the USSR was just a metaphor for here and there.

The concept of trust that has to be established with sources is incredible important for all journalists. It is the foundation on which they can collect information and it's betrayal is a failure of honour and a collapse of trust. This can result in a closing of sources which are so very important to finding the information which the public depends on journalists to provide.
Shame, shame, shame on Wired...Wired Releases Full Manning/Lamo Chat Logs
| from the crossed-fingers-legally-binding dept.
| posted by timothy on Friday July 15, @08:06 (The Media)
| with 282 comments
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/15/000213/Wired-Releases-Full-ManningLamo-Chat-Logs?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]bill_mcgonigle writes "After more than a year, Wired has finally
released the (nearly) full [1]chat logs between Adrian Lamo and Bradley
Manning. Glen Greenwald provides [2]analysis of what Wired previously
left out. Greenwald writes: 'Lamo lied to and manipulated Manning by
promising him the legal protections of a journalist-source and
priest-penitent relationship, and independently assured him that their
discussions were "never to be published" and were not "for print."
Knowing this, Wired hid from the public this part of their exchange,
published the chat in violation of Lamo's clear not-for-publication
pledges, allowed Lamo to be quoted repeatedly in the media over the next
year as some sort of credible and trustworthy source driving reporting on
the Manning case.'"

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/15/000213/Wired-Releases-Full-ManningLamo-Chat-Logs?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://blog.bfccomputing.com/
1. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/manning-lamo-logs
2. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/14/wired/index.html