Someone has to stand up and be counted:(Thanks to the CBC for this) Arts & Entertainment News Clark Kent rants about journalism Superman alter-ego quits Daily Planet Both comic book geeks and journalists were buzzing about the latest issue of Superman today as his mild-mannered alter ego Clark Kent quits his job as a reporter for the Daily Planet. Clark Kent quits The Daily Planet and bemoans the state of journalism in his newsroom resignation speech. bit.ly/TNqjTI Romenesko a day ago ReplyRetweetFavorite In Superman #13, Kent gets chewed out by his boss Perry White for not having filed a story in a week. Kent gets philosophical about journalism, saying, "Why am I the one sounding like a grizzled ink-stained wretch who believes news should be about-- I don't know, news?" "Times are changing and print is a dying medium," says White. OMG Clark Kent, thank you. #THANKYOU pic.twitter.com/ZRpXCKzk NMMan a day ago ReplyRetweetFavorite But the journalism business being what it is, some in the media said that Kent would more likely be fired than quit. Wouldn't it be more realistic for Clark Kent to be laid off from the Daily Planet, rather than quit? jimromenesko.com/2012/10/22... Mike Madden a day ago ReplyRetweetFavorite In the new issue of Superman, Clark Kent quits the Daily Planet. In reality, he'd be laid off or looking for a PR gig: pic.twitter.com/Syr1cl3f RobTornoe a day ago ReplyRetweetFavorite As Clark Kent quits his job, a New Yorker cartoon I have pinned to my desk: pic.twitter.com/dY6nNZXw James Bradshaw a day ago ReplyRetweetFavorite

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/why_the_western_media_hates_julian_assange_20120823/?utm_source=twitterfeed Check this out: Why the Western Media Hates Julian Assange Posted on Aug 23, 2012 OperationPaperStorm (CC BY 2.0) Professional jealousy; dogmatic institutionalism; craven loyalty to power. Glenn Greenwald fires a devastating salvo at the British and American press for their dogged campaign of “disgusting slander” against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “[L]et us pause to reflect on a truly amazing and revealing fact, one that calls for formal study in several academic fields of discipline,” Greenwald writes. “Is it not remarkable that one of the very few individuals over the past decade to risk his welfare, liberty and even life to meaningfully challenge the secrecy regime on which the American national security state (and those of its obedient allies) depends just so happens to have become—long before he sought asylum from Ecuador—the most intensely and personally despised figure among the American and British media class and the British ‘liberal’ intelligentsia?” —Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly. Follow him on Twitter: @areedkelly. Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian: There are several obvious reasons why Assange provokes such unhinged media contempt. The most obvious among them is competition: the resentment generated by watching someone outside their profession generate more critical scoops in a year than all other media outlets combined (see this brilliant 2008 post, in the context of the Clintons, about how professional and ego-based competition produces personal hatred like nothing else can). Other causes are more subtle though substantive. Many journalists (and liberals) like to wear the costume of outsider-insurgent, but are, at their core, devoted institutionalists, faithful believers in the goodness of their society’s power centers, and thus resent those (like Assange) who actually and deliberately place themselves outside of it. By putting his own liberty and security at risk to oppose the world’s most powerful factions, Assange has clearly demonstrated what happens to real adversarial dissidents and insurgents – they’re persecuted, demonized, and threatened, not befriended by and invited to parties within the halls of imperial power – and he thus causes many journalists to stand revealed as posers, servants to power, and courtiers. Then there’s the ideological cause. As one long-time British journalist told me this week when discussing the vitriol of the British press toward Assange: “Nothing delights British former lefties more than an opportunity to defend power while pretending it is a brave stance in defence of a left liberal principle.” That’s the warped mindset that led to so many of these self-styled liberal journalists to support the attack on Iraq and other acts of Western aggression in the name of liberal values. And it’s why nothing triggers their rage like fundamental critiques of, and especially meaningful opposition to, the institutions of power to which they are unfailingly loyal.

From the Columbia School of Journalism http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/election_2012_coverage_another.php on "the persisting gender gap in opinion media. Women’s voices were especially lacking in legacy media, and on ‘hard news’ topics like the economy and politics—both of which are just as much women’s issues as they are men’s, mind you—according to byline data collected by The OpEd Project." Check it out at there web site.

The future of the newspaper is very much part of the news over the last few years. Local papers actually thrive and here in Japan the large national newspapers are still viable business operations. Questions of what is news and what is missed continue. Should news be free is the question with the following article from quoted from Slashdot with many of the comments that followed which are very interesting if you are at all interested in this question (note that the Slashdot community is made up of nerds and geeks so you are getting the best insights available): Free News Unsustainable, Says Warren Buffett Posted by Soulskill on Friday May 25, @05:29PM from the there-ain't-no-such-thing-as-a-free-article dept. Koreantoast writes "Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway recently purchased 63 newspapers and plans to purchase more over the next few years, noted during an interview that the current free content model is unsustainable and will likely continue pushing toward more electronic subscription models. This coincides with moves by other newspaper companies like Gannett and the New York Times, which are also erecting paywall systems. Buffett notes that newspapers focusing on local content will have a unique product, which would succeed even if they lose subscribers, because their services are irreplaceable. Is this the beginning of the end of 'free content' for local news?" 100 of 195 comments loaded twitterfacebook news yaright greed ← You may like to read: → Curt Schilling Fires Entire Staff At 38 Studios In Nothing We Trust TSA's mm-Wave Body Scanner Breaks Diabetic Teen's $10K Insulin Pump $60 Light Bulb Debuts On Earth Day Windows 8 Won't Play DVDs Unless You Pay For the Media Center Pack Anti-Education Attack Poisons 150 Afghan Schoolgirls Submission: The coming end of "free content" news? Texter Not Responsible For Textee's Car Accident, Rules Judge PostLoad All Comments 21 Full79 Abbreviated0 Hidden /Sea Search 195 CommentsLog In/Create an AccountComments Filter: All Insightful Informative Interesting Funny The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. › The End of Free? (Score:4, Insightful) by Mikkeles (698461) on Friday May 25, @05:31PM (#40114103) Maybe, but if it's good local news (well researched and useful to me), I'm willing to pay reasonably for it. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re:The End of Free? (Score:5, Insightful) by dintech (998802) on Friday May 25, @05:38PM (#40114201) One of the oldest local newspapers in London, the Evening Standard [wikipedia.org] used to be 50 pence and is now free. It's online content isn't behind a paywall either. They still seem to be doing ok so it can work out in some cases. Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: Even better; but I wonder how long advertising can sustain such an effort. I've also found that many of the free papers are totally irrelevant wrt newsworthiness due to being just a collection of syndicated items. Re:The End of Free? (Score:5, Informative) by sortius_nod (1080919) on Friday May 25, @06:12PM (#40114647) Homepage As someone who has worked for a newspaper/online news org, I've seen the profit/loss statements, & subscriptions/sales don't even rate on it. Newspapers make the lion's share of their revenue purely from advertising contracts. Some may see this as an outdated business model due to the prices charged for advertising space (upwards of AU$100k per full page), but it's is how they've made money in the past. The main hurdle with going online is that no one is going to pay you the same rates for banner ads. Paywalling has its own problems too: Murdoch paywalls are easily bypassed, others drive consumers away due to no free content. I really don't see any answer other than accepting the fact there's not massive amounts of money in news media these days. Personally, I tend to read independent online publications such as New Matilda, Conversation AU, & Independent Australia, (yes, I'm an Aussie) which rely on donations & small amounts of advertising revenue. The level of journalism is actually higher than that of news sites subsidised by their print or TV media. Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: Thank you. I was not aware of any of these.I found New Matilda [newmatilda.com] and Independent Australia [independentaustralia.net] but would like to confirm I have the correct site for Conversation AU [theconversation.edu.au]. Re: Yes indeed, that last one is correct. Re: What is really going on here is ease of acceptability. No huge building, with printing presses, transport and delivery system and sales sites required. You can squeeze internet news to just the journalist and if you're an ass hat like Ariana Huffington you can suck them into doing for free and then sell out from underneath them (oh so slimy). So the problem with free internet news, is not that the model is bad, it's that easy access has driven up competition. Now add in global competition to that mix and Re: Having worked for " Americas Only Rock and Roll Magazine" and others till I settled into a real life, I can say I've certainly seen the tumultuous life that publications go through. But I welcome this internet age and the change it brings. Honestly, Thomas Jefferson was right about "newspapers" , their net value to man and their caveats.( don't bother me, google it) I see many evolutions happening to various media as do you. Television, movies, music and print. The outcome, for those of you remaining in den Re: When the Evening Standard was sold for a price, it was a failing paper and was loss-making. Now it is a free-sheet (and under new ownership) it is popular and profitable.I don't read the Standard as I don't live in London, but it's owned by the same proprietor as The Independent- one of the few genuinely quality daily nationals. Re: I worry that we are heading to a real-time wikipedia of truthiness that is driven by rumour and here-say.News outlets on occasion provided us with a reasoned and measured interpretation of events, albeit interspersed with whatever political dogma was pertinent to the writer, editor and paymasters respectively.Now the the first "frosty piss" on twitter is rebroadcast, amplified and contorted until it's a hideous warping of one singular and imperfect being's interpretation of events. I thInk we should all lam Re: The Evening Standard is fine if your idea of news is is mostly celebrities and sports. If people didn't grab it to read on the train going home after work, they'd likely go under. Re: But the quality has dropped. It's news for hire now. Re:The End of Free? (Score:4, Interesting) by pepty (1976012) on Friday May 25, @06:12PM (#40114659) And if it's bad local news, someone else is willing to pay for you to see it. The San Diego Union Tribune was recently bought by a real estate developer. Mostly because it was so cheap he could turn a profit just by selling the land the paper owned, but he also said pretty bluntly that he did it so he could use the paper as a megaphone to promote his own local real estate development plans and political views. Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: You don't seem to understand the role technology plays in transforming how societies work. The killer is the loss of advertising revenue (Score:5, Informative) by knorthern knight (513660) on Friday May 25, @11:27PM (#40117591) > For centuries we have been paying for news by buying > newspapers - paying for news sites is pretty much the same thing Fact... your subscription comes *NOWHERE NEAR* the full cost of a newspaper (buying paper, paying reporters, editors, printers, delivery trucks, janitors, secretaries, etc, etc). The vast majority of newspaper revenue has been from advertising. Newspaper ad revenue in the USA has fallen from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $23.9 billion in 2011 http://newsosaur.blogspot.ca/2012/03/newspaper-sales-slid-to-1984-level-in.html [blogspot.ca] The last time it was that low was in 1984. That's *WITHOUT ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION*. Just like Facebook, subscribers were never the real customers. Advertisers were the real customers, and subscribers' eyeballs were the product that newspapers sold to advertisers. In "the good ole days" newspapers had a virtual monopoly on advertising. They were able to charge extortionate rates for advertising. This allowed them pay for correpondents in Baghdad, London, Moscow, Washington, and at state/provincial legislatures, and at city halls, and still turn a big fat profit. Department stores, auto dealers, and home sellers were effectively paying an "advertising tax" to sell their products. Where there's a tax, someone will look for tax loopholes ("advertising tax avoidance"). * "Auto Trader Magazine" was established in 1977. See... http://www.manta.com/c/mmj727f/auto-trader-magazine [manta.com] It had one major advantage over newspaper classifieds... it did not have the overhead of paying for the salaries/accomadations/airline-tickets of reporters all over the planet. It was an advertising "pure play", that had a lot less overhead than a newspaper, and could make a profit while charging much lower ad rates. It ate newspapers' breakfast, lunch, and supper as far as used-car ads were concerned. * Right now, where I live, there are 2 or 3 free weekly employment "papers" (to use the term loosely) that can be picked up at newspaper boxes around the city. They're 1/2 tabloid size. One reason they can use the free model is that they don't have to pay for reporters, etc * Back in the mid-1980's, "The Real Estate Weekly" came out in Toronto. It was a free 1/2 tabloid put out by the local MLS (Multiple Listing Service), a co-operative venture of local real estate firms. It had a lot more leeway that Auto Trader or the employment weeklies. Auto Trader and the employment weeklies are put out by for-profit corporations. "The Real Estate Weekly" could break even, or even lose a bit of money. But as long as it cost the the member real estate firms less than running ads in local papers, the real estate firms came out ahead. * Major national chains began printing their own advertising flyers and having newspapers insert them ("advertising inserts"). This cost less than having the newspapers print them. Next step was, with falling newspaper circulation, it became obvious that the newspaper deliveries covered only part of the target market. The only way to cover all of a market was to either... - have a private firm deliver the flyers door-to-door (suitable for single-dwelling units) - or send the flyers as 3rd-class "junkmail" to all units in rental and condominium buildings Notice something about the 4 examples above? There is no mention whatsoever of the internet or the World Wide Web. Even in a pre-web world, newspapers were losing classified ad revenues for used cars, employment, real estate, and retail advertising to non-newspaper competitors. The competitors have now expanded to websites, but the first losses were occuring before the web existed. To summarize newspapers main problem... their business model requires selling advertising at rates way in excess of cost, and using that margin to pay journalists. That works only as long as you have a monopoly/cartel situation. Once newspapers lost Read the rest of this comment... Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: A fun fact extension is that the cover price for printed newspapers generally doesn't even cover the price of physically printing the ink on the paper and shipping it to the newsagent. The advertising pays not only for the journalists and offices and whatnot, but even covers a part of the cost of the printed medium.When the news content is served over the internet, which has a vastly lower cost to run than the cost of the physical newspapers, and considering that internet advertising is if anything more use Re: Its not so much double dipping as in the ads aren't worth much online and advertisers know that very quickly. The TV and print media have been very good at convincing their customers that ads worked and they worked well. Why do you think that being an advertising executives was shown in such a good light in 1960s tv shows? Re: Or just give it away like USAToday; about 2/3 of their circulation is handed out to hotels and schools. To paraphrase Mark Twain: "They charge nothing for their paper, and it's worth it". Problem: many "for profit" papers are unprofitable Many "for profit" newspapers are are the wrong kind of "non profit", and quite a few have gone under. The vast majority of newspaper revenues are from advertising. The sum total of USA newspaper advertising revenue has dropped from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $23.9 billion in 2011.Subscriptions are peanuts in comparison. Subscriptions might pay enough to have the paper delivered. They come nowhere near enough to pay for newsprint, printing machines and printing staff, secretaries, janitors, phone bills, office hardly (Score:4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25, @05:31PM (#40114115) Why would anyone pay to be lied to Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: ...when so many people are happy to do it for free. Re: clearly your hookers are less sarcastic than mine Re: How else are you going to find out what's in your kitchen that could be killing you?! Re: Because the truth is unpleasant. As cliche as the saying goes, it is true: People can't handle the truth. Re: It's true. Sometimes I think they're going to come after me with pitchforks. Re: Most of the lying isn't in the articles, it's in the ads. Particularly lying by omission, which is the sine qua non of advertising. He doesn't get it (Score:5, Insightful) by Vintermann (400722) on Friday May 25, @05:36PM (#40114173) Homepage I'd wager a lot of the price of media companies now reflects their control, not their profitability. Sure, making money by selling news is great, but the power to set society's agenda, and frame events for the history books, is infinitely more valuable. If you think of that as the raison d' etre of the big media companies, it becomes obvious why they offer "news" free on the internet. Also, that Buffet will pay a premium for these shares... Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: In my country there are a lot of newspapers, like everywhere else. Almost all of them lose money. I can give you two examples on both extremes: There's a piece of toilet paper called "Correio da Manhã" (Morning Mail) which is a huge commercial success. 1 quarter is ass-kissing the government, the other is filled with sensationalist news about murders and robberies, the other is about sports, and the last is celebrity gossip + tits n'ass. It appeals to the uneducated masses and exploits the lowest f Re: or, you know, run an ad network masquerading as a forum masquerading as a blog Re: Buffett has made a fair chunk of change by investing in some fairly shady outfits. The perpetual motion ripoff machine known as Kirby Vacuums is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, for one example. You doen't get it Warren Buffet is in court over not paying his taxes. HE was on tv several times talking about taxing 'rich' people more, taxes he doesn't pay. Also, taxes that won't impact the way he makes money . Taxes are fun, you should study them and their application so you don't sound like a useful idiot. Buffet should be smarter than this... (Score:4, Insightful) by mspohr (589790) on Friday May 25, @05:38PM (#40114195) Guy buys a lot of newspapers and now is discovering that he can't make money with them? He doesn't think they have a viable business model? Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re:Buffet should be smarter than this... (Score:5, Interesting) by Mashiki (184564) on Friday May 25, @05:51PM (#40114371) Homepage Well he hasn't made money for a bit to be honest, and has made some seriously bad blue-chip gambles that fell flat on their face too. Which has a lot of people wondering if he's simply hit the senile point and he's out of touch with the markets. I remember reading hmm was it zerohedge or somewhere else, that he hasn't made money in over 3 years on any investments he's done. Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: If your time-horizon is three years, you're not even playing the same game as Mr. Buffet. And you're far less likely to make money at whatever it is you are doing... Re: Right. I play in currencies, which unlike stocks is by far riskier and has a much nastier bite, requiring you to understand not only companies, but government policy and how it will effect your trading. But make less money? No, hardly that. The riskier the game, the higher the payoff. And it doesn't get riskier than the currency market. Re: Except its not. Higher risk does not automatically guarantee higher payoff. Re: Of course it doesn't. Though it usually does, and one doesn't get anywhere without taking risks. The reality is traditional media as it stands isn't a risk, or even a worthwhile risk. It's a poor risk with no ROI, the deadtree form of media is just that dead. The electronic form of media is and quickly been subverted by free media, and a round of large aggregate services.The smaller papers which have gone to paywalls have quickly killed any viewership unless they have very unique content which is being Re: Past 3 years you say? Hmm... I seem to remember something about a recession... maybe starting in 2008.Nah.. that can't be right.. Buffett probably is just senile. Re: Yeah I mean it's not like other people haven't made money or anything. Making money when the economy is on the downturn is the easy part. It's keeping it when it's booming that's the hard part. Re: If I were modding, I'd go +1 interesting, but I'm not (I don't seem to get mod points these days; dunno why; whatever).Why is it that so many people equate intelligence with smart? The cliche joke is Mensa. They may be intelligent, but the only smart (purported) Mensa sort I've known was Shepherd from Stargate:Atlantis (he took the tests, that's all). All my life, I've been hearing about "book smart" vs. "street smart." Mensa are not generally known for street smarts. Then there's the shit they teach i Re: well, he's buying papers which he thinks has a local monopoly. that's pretty much his "safe bet" in this. charging for local gov. bulletins and soccer practice timetables. if you give those for free on your net edition, why would the locals bother subscribing?-) Re: No, he thinks that they are under-valued and have the potential of making money in the future . . . if the free news model disappears, and the pay-walled model becomes the norm and profitable. If that actually will come to be in the future . . . is quite debatable. So anyway, he bought them because he thinks he can give them a better business model. Re: No. It's more like "Guy thinks he can forsee a sea-change in the way an industry works, buys up some of the industry, and then makes announcements about how the industry will change, possible encouraging the very change he's speculating on by virtue of his reputation." Re: If you analysis model is, "Warren Buffett should be smarter than this," you should think harder about it. I'm not saying he never makes a mistake, but he's a pretty smart investor.For example, an alternative model is, "Warren Buffett sees a solution to the problems of print media. First, he invests in underpriced, struggling print media organizations. Then, he comes out saying that their old model is bad business. Finally, he introduces a new, more profitable model."Warren Buffett's no idiot. Everyone clear Re: Or he thinks that their value in shaping opinion will increase his profit in other areas enough to make up for his losses in owning them, but he needs to make people think that he is expecting to make a profit from the news business (rather than planning to use the news business to make a profit elsewhere). Online or offline? (Score:5, Insightful) by war4peace (1628283) on Friday May 25, @05:43PM (#40114265) I'd venture to differentiate between online news and offline news. A paper magazine, sure, I'd pay for it more than the paper it's written on if I consider it a collectible. But online... I'm more interested in the hard data itself rather than the way it's written, and with all the portals publishing user-generated content (and some of those are REALLY good), I am not afraid of lacking any news sources any time soon. So what if I won't get informed about Justin Bieber's latest deeds right now? Some blog would republish the news in some way or another, if it's important enough, and Google's your friend. And of course, there's always Slashdot. As a matter of fact, I'm regularly visiting just Slashdot, Wikipedia, Wimp, Failblog and a couple local news sites (which are both awesome). Everything else can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned, and if any of the above go to hell themselves, well, I'll look for the next best thing. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate At least there's the BBC... (Score:3, Interesting) by SeanDS (1039000) on Friday May 25, @05:44PM (#40114279) ...which is funded by the British licence fee. As long as the current BBC-hating government don't cripple the corporation beyond repair. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Grassroots reform (Score:3, Insightful) by Tommy Bologna (2431404) on Friday May 25, @05:44PM (#40114281) Local news coverage is abysmal in most American towns. Subscription support would at least allow them to hire a handful of professional reporters, and might even breathe life back into the field of journalism. God knows we need better journalists at all levels. Rebooting the minor leagues might eventually benefit us by trickling up to the national level too -- but let's not get ahead of ourselves. I would be ecstatic if Philadelphia had some quality reporting instead of the wasteland of fluffy features and regurgitated national news service stories. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate So why is news different? (Score:3) by MindlessAutomata (1282944) on Friday May 25, @05:48PM (#40114331) "Free" is increasingly becoming the new thing; free-to-play models are starting to rise and succeed in video games, free steaming tv shows and other video are becoming increasingly popular, and naturally there are companies that operate in a way someone-like Google does. How many android/iPhone apps are free? And then we see various music services cropping up that allow free streaming music.. Why would the news be different from this trend? It's harder and harder to prevent the dissemination and replication of information (pirating etc) and companies are finding creative new ways to still make money even in light of that. And the news is subject to the same problem; a paywall is not a big deal if one person has a subscription and can pass the text of the article around elsewhere. All it takes is for one competitor to shit in the pot and go free or next-to-free to ruin the market for everyone else; I don't see pay-for news being a viable or stable strategy in the long-term. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: How are reporters going to be paid? Do you think they will work for free? Re: There are already applications that write better news articles than the average Times or Guardian piece. Re: Newspapers are a modern equivalent of buggy whips. Their business is based around limited availability of information - and on explaining the information to a minimally educated person. Today you can get your news directly from news agencies of all countries in the world. Cost of each short piece of news is nearly zero. Some news are produced on taxpayer's dime (NASA and other government entities; BBC.) Other news sources are financed by governments to disseminate the information about the country. Not e And yet he posits this notion on a free site... (Score:5, Insightful) by mark-t (151149) <`markt' `at' `lynx.bc.ca'> on Friday May 25, @05:49PM (#40114343) Journal Anyone else see the irony here? Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate People Care Less About Local News Than They Say (Score:3) by reallocate (142797) on Friday May 25, @05:50PM (#40114353) Buffett's right, of course. No business can survive without making a profit. I am skeptical, however, that local news is going to save the day. Why? Because people are not as interested as they say they are in local news. My local daily paper publishes a weekly section targeting my suburb. I don't see much news in it, but I do see a lot stories about clubs, schools, kids, and churches, I once had the chance to ask the editor why they went with that rather than hard news about town government, politics, etc. The answer: We print the stories that sell newspapers. The local news market is not a hard news market. It's a feel-good gossip market. When a newspaper shrinks and fires newsroom staff, news production in that market drops and is not replaced by online sources. We are all more ignorant as the result, and it's an ignorance that's spreading. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: Well, that's your experience. Around here we had a small TV channel create a local news program that talked exclusively about the government, and politics. One day it did go to a public hospital, and interview the governor (we don't have a mayor here) asking why it is so bad, the other it was asking the transportation people when a hole in a street would be fixed... That kind of thing.In the end, they made so well that all the other news had to adapt. Some channels even stopped doing news because they could Pay for what? (Score:2) When the quality of newspapers has been going down, and the shear quantity of news is going up, I fail to see how newspapers are going to be able to compete. Compare a guy who is willing to post news to his blog and get the generated ad-revenue to a newspaper, who has a reporter, editor and all the other associated overhead of a newspaper I would say no contest.If newspapers did good reporting, they may have a shot, but right now I don't see that happening. Re: Furthermore, I'm sick and tired of subscribing to things. Sure, maybe it's only $2 a month for your favorite local news. And it's $5 a month for your favorite game. Netflix is $8 per month. Flikr is $2 per month. Hulu Plus is $8 per month, but soon they want to require that you have a cable TV subscription, so that will be another $50 per month or whatever.This shit really adds up! If I'm paying all this money, I sure as SHIT better not see one god damn commercial or product interruption. Oh wait, they alre Re: Just stop paying for a few months. See if you miss it. Go out more or read more books (yes they cost $ but not a subscription) or play board games or??? ummmm (Score:3) by Have Brain Will Rent (1031664) on Friday May 25, @05:56PM (#40114439) Shouldn't that be "Free and Accurate News Unsustainable"? Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Work Takes Time & Money: News At 11 (Score:2) This just in: having someone collect facts, check them, and then present them takes time and money. Free news was never sustainable, it's just that until recently it wasn't attainable. News will always have a price, be it paying for your paper or having someone else pay for it by inserting ads. Unfortunately advertisers are discovering that online advertising doesn't work, so we'll probably have to settle on the former. Ultimately we're tired of over paying for AP crap (Score:5, Insightful) by Karmashock (2415832) on Friday May 25, @06:00PM (#40114477) The vast majority of "news" is reprocessed news hey pulled off the news wire. If the newspapers do investigative reporting and generate unique content that people actually want to see they won't have a problem. If they have interesting or knowledgable people that contribute or comment on the news they can probably build a business model on that. If all they're doing is reading internet news and then republishing it as their own then that isn't going to work. Is free news really not sustainable? I don't know if even that is true. Companies especially local businesses are DESPERATE for relevant advertising options. Absolutely desperate. Radio, newspapers, park benches... anything. And that has always been a big part of newspaper revenue. When newspapers started they were little more then glorified classified ads. Maybe one or two pages of local news followed by forty pages of classifieds. And yet crag's list exists. Why is that? How could Crag's list have a viable business in cities with major newspapers? Because they offered a better classified ad. And that sort of thing is evident throughout the newspaper business. They're generally bad at the internet. Even their ipad apps are bad. Seen the new york times app? Horrible. When most people bring up a news paper app they want it to be the actual newspaper and not what is basically a webpage configured roughly into the shape of a newspaper. It would be really easy to do this. Hell, you could literally scan the pages vertabim jewelry ads and all into the system. A lot of people would prefer it that way... especially those willing to pay for an online new york times subscription. Anyway, Buffet just bought 63 news papers across the country. So we'll see how he does but I'm predicting epic failure. This is sort of like the time Bill Gates tried to reform American public schools and found so many useless dicks in the system that he figured it would be more practical to cure Malaria in Africa. Have fun with the newspapers Warren... at the very least then you can say it was entertaining. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: True to an extent, but if you have a cute local restaurant you're not going to want to put an ad for it right next to a write-up of a recent child murder. Around here, that kind of advertising goes into the weekly papers, along with the live music listings and the coupons for discount spa treatments. None of that stuff is underwriting the actual news reporting. Re: Well, if your classifies page is crap then someone is going to do it better. A lot of the free papers... totally free papers have no news in them at all. They're just ads and classifies... and sometimes real estate stuff.Every single ad dollar that went into those papers is a dollar the big main paper didn't get. Possibly the big paper could publish both and publish them separately. That way you can fund your unprofitable news charity with real business dollars from the ads.Whatever... the reality is that t Re: Believe it or not, there are laws about that, at least if you plan to sell your product through the U.S. Post. Re: There are newspapers that are 100 percent ads... so I don't see how there is a law about this... if there is there shouldn't be... what right does anyone have to tell the paper how many ads they can put in it? that's just silly. Buffet can go stuff it. (Score:2, Funny) Yeah, free news is unsustainable, right Mr. Buffet!Oh, you must mean don't buy Gold because gold isn't money too eh Mr. Buffet? (As he secretly uses proxies to sell off ETF's to drop the price so he can buy _physical_ gold for low prices.)Or maybe Mr. Buffet really means in translation: We need to put the alternative media out of reach of the internet because too many people are connecting the dots and realize how much of a scam our government is and how the political system really works. (ala Rothchild she Re: You know, it does read like a comic book doesn't it?If it was any other day on a different planet it wold just seem crazy and out of place. Not here on planet Earth though.Sadly, it is all true and because we live in a comic book world of politicans and corruption being so common place, most people just want to be blind about it because they don't want to face everything that is happening. From the collapse of Europe undergoing right now, to NDAA, Patriot Act turning the constitution into just a sheet of Omaha World-Herald (Score:5, Informative) by Enderandrew (866215) <{enderandrew} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday May 25, @06:06PM (#40114575) Homepage Journal Buffet bailed out his local paper first. I worked there. It was "employee" owned in that you could buy stock, but the stock had to stay with the company and usually when the company got rid of people, the executives kept just awarding more and more stock to themselves. They kept paying themselves huge bonuses and talked publicly about record profits, but they maintained the profits by layoffs and pay cuts followed by more layoffs and pay cuts. The publisher/CEO told me that the thought the internet wouldn't affect the newspaper industry at all. It was the same as radio and TV before it. He also bragged about how proud he was of the newspaper's legacy of enacting change in the community via propaganda. When Nebraska was being considered for the first legal casinos outside of reservations, Atlantic City and Vegas, the World-Herald ran front page stories daily about how gambling was evil and would immediately destroy any metropolitan area it was in. So the casinos built right across the river in Iowa. Iowa has been rolling in tax revenue since then, while all the money comes from Omaha. The casinos haven't destroyed our city, but we missed out on all the tax revenue thanks to the paper. I also spoke to a reporter whose assignment was literally to slander someone running for city council in Lincoln, Nebraska as much as possible. He owned a sex toy company, which was against the morals of the paper, and they felt it was their duty to bury the guy. Oddly enough, the paper didn't have morals when it came to abusing employees and laying them off. The company was run exceedingly poorly. Oddly enough, most of the suggestions I made to improve the company were implemented about two years later when the newspaper was somewhat forced to embrace the digital era. Google News has said they'd share revenue with newspapers who feed them stories. And I specifically frequent news sites that have good writers and good view points. You can run a successful newspaper, though the physical product may eventually die out. It is a shame that Buffet is bailing out poorly run companies, because the same corrupt executives who lined their pockets as they laid everyone off just got rewarded for their behavior so it can continue some more. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate It isnt free now (Score:2) You are paying by watching ads. Re: Soon it will be like television where you pay for the service AND are forced [slashdot.org] to watch the commercials! Re: What ads? As a way of thanking me for my existence, I am eligible to enable ad-blocking software. Re: i'm not talking about people that circumvent the system.And some are about impossible to block. ( like the redirect pages ). Free news isn't as good, but that's the point (Score:2) I get all of my news from weekly magazines: The Economist, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. They actually report on things that are important (that is, things that I consider important), because I am paying them. Free online news exploits my psychological weaknesses to present me with ad impressions, because the advertisers are paying them. I think what Buffet is saying is that there are (at least) two different markets for news: people who want a distraction, and people who want insight Re: May I ask: What are the main benefits you get out of this quality journalism? Making you a better citizen/voter? Making you a better conversationalist? Making you a more moral person? Making you better understand the world so you can make better decisions (purchases and other life choices)? Making it possible to comment and impress your views on the public debate? And what use do you make of the ads in these quality publications? I'm not paying for you to deliver me ads (Score:2) You want subscription money? You're gonna deliver a product free of ads. Re: That's not going to happen with most newspapers and magazines. People won't pay extra for an ad-free experience when it's easy to ignore or block the ads. It may be another matter if unblockable animated ads start getting placed around content in publications such as tablet apps. Free or Ad Supported? (Score:2) Free news is not sustainable?Somebody better tell CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox and CNN soon. They and others have only been doing that for 90 years or so. I wonder how they pay the bills??Or perhaps Mr. Buffet is not in the right business. In other news.... (Score:2) "Warren Buffet proof that rick people are not smart", says Lumpy.Honestly, the old fart has no clue at all. there has been free news for thousands of years. I think the man needs to get a clue as to how the world works and step outside his ivory tower and see how things have been done for the past 200 years.free news has been king for over 50 years now. I dont pay for my TV news. Re: TV news can more accurately be described as 'infotainment' for the masses; worth-while stories are glossed over, discourse limited to 30 second sound bites, certain important topics not covered at all, human interest stories (puke). Yeah, you don't pay for TV "news". What Buffet's doing is signaling that market that pay walls are OK. Here's what I think is happening: The occupy movement has actually been quite effective at one thing and that's bringing wealth inequality into national discourse, much to In other news.... (Score:4, Insightful) by JustNiz (692889) on Friday May 25, @08:25PM (#40116107) Free News Unsustainable, Says Warren Buffett Billionaires Unsustainable, says Free News... Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate They All Started Out Free (Score:2) Almost without exception, newspapers started out being free and entirely ad-supported. Several small papers in my area still are. Of course, many newspapers moved on to a pay-per-issue model, while still containing all the advertising, if not more. That does not mean it is necessary. Clearly it is not, as the counterexamples demonstrate. It merely means they are greedy. News is a lucrative business. I see absolutely no reason why news cannot continue to be ad-supported. I stopped reading the New York Ti Re: I should have added: I don't think the recent failures have much to do with ad-supported news being non-viable, at all. I think it has had a lot more to do with poor implementations than anything else. Free news has sustained TV stations (Score:3) by Skapare (16644) on Friday May 25, @09:12PM (#40116511) Homepage TV news broadcasts work on the free news model, already, and it works. Ask CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Ask your local TV stations if they will be an alternative news source to the paywalled locked local newspapers when Buffet comes buying. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Free news unsustainable.. sure..but 63 papers also (Score:2) Face it, we need at most less than 10 english language papers.There is no need to have 63 copies of the same AP articles and random articles about someone 1,000 miles away getting robbed or murdered.Plus, the news is so CLEARLY propaganda these days, that the people pushing the propaganda better pay for it, or why bother consuming it.There is a huge glut of news (and every other form of entertainment.) It must fall in price.It can do so now because instead of selling to 100,000 readers, it's selling to 1,0 Whining (Score:2) Is this the beginning of the end of 'free content' for local news?No, it's the equivalent of the whining you see from the other old corporate clowns whenever a technological paradigm shift happens. It's akin to the *AA and their histrionics about home video back in the 1980s and filesharing today. Rest of the deal (Score:2) This many comments and no one mentions the rest of the deal? He bought the papers for about $140M. He also loaned the company he bought them from $400M at 10% annual interest. And Warren doesn't make loans like that unless the terms protect him in the event that the borrower goes bankrupt. So if the papers he bought just break even, he's still making a decent return on the overall investment. policing the 1% (Score:2) The One Percent [youtube.com]47:45 Nicole Buffett describes her life, then gets booted from the family for good for having said not much at all. Her claim to the Buffett name was indirect, and it might not have been the first time she said more than Warren liked, but still it's hard to imagine such a cold business. It is (Score:2) If you can fold a device, such as a pad or an e-reader, around it. Without a physical access barrier (which obviously has to be attractive in other ways) - forget it. What's wrong with Warren Buffett? (Score:5, Informative) by PCM2 (4486) on Friday May 25, @05:51PM (#40114379) Homepage What's wrong with Warren Buffett? He's made a lot of money for himself, true, but he's made a lot of money for other people besides. And as for his own wealth, he's in the process of donating it all to charity, to the tune of billions going toward important causes that governments are too broke or shortsighted to fund. He was instrumental in convincing Bill Gates to do the same. If you're going to demonize some successful, wealthy American, I can think of a lot of better targets. Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: Or, in the US, cannot be government funded. There is supposed to be a limit to what the federal government does, although it rarely applies those limits to itself anymore. I.e., neither broke nor shortsighted. I like Warren. And his song about Margueritaville. He's just wasting away ... Re: And "Margaritaville" was a decent song if you like country music. Oh, wait... Re: ... and he did it all from singing about going on a bender and discovering that the salt shaker is missing. Re: When rich people give away excess money to charities, that does not absolve them of guilt for the actions that made them wealthy in the first place. Just because Bill Gates gives away a bunch of money, that doesn't excuse he got that money using illegal monopoly tactics [wikipedia.org]. You can't get credit for giving away money that you stole from taxpayers in the first place.In recent years in particular, Buffett's wealth has been acquired using insider information from his cronies in the White House, actions that woul Re: Buffett was always interested in companies where he had inside information of some form, especially things that allowed him to push toward a "control situation [gurufocus.com]" to improve the value of the stock once he owned enough of it. One of the major investments that built up his early trading cash pile [gurufocus.com] was in GEICO. That came from personally interviewing someone at the company, rather than using the publicly available information about it.If that happened today, it would have insider trading questions all around it Re: News is, by definition, anything new or recent. Regardless of how frequently it happens or has happened in the past. There is no strict mandate that news be interesting. Re: That's an easy position to take and it's one that's probably held by many people. But it's not the ideological stand some like to make it out to be. It's just a reaction to the current reality. At the moment you can opt for a free alternative to the news you're not willing to pay for. So your lack of willingness to pay doesn't have much negative impact on you. If those free alternatives end up being scaled back significantly to the point where they don't meet your needs, then your decision over whether to p Re: He knows that, but if he doesn't make it sound like he thinks he can make money from the actual sale of news (rather than from getting people to support whatever government policy one of his other companies will make a profit off of) people will catch on and it will stop working. Re: Craigslist is actually a really big part of the decline of local papers. Classifieds were a pretty big chunk of revenue. I think people forgot all about that. Re: Quite right. But given the small fraction of readers who actually see a particular ad in a freely-distributed publication, the smaller number who are interested in it, and the even smaller number who are influenced by it, it's understandable why many advertisers are migrating to the better ROI platforms of search engine ads and their own websites, squeezing the money available for editorial, which is our only source of purchase information that has at least has some chance of being free from spin. Re: Unlike newsprint, digital publications have index pages with many headlines (sometimes with short summaries) that are separate from full articles. I find these much quicker to scan than a layout of complete articles, particularly when articles in a printed paper are surrounded with ads that can't be automatically removed like they can on webpages. The problem is that I'm usually only interested in one article in a hundred, which makes it hard to justify a subscription over an a la carte model.

Don't say I didn't tell you so:Sunday, Jan. 8, 2012 SUNDAY TIMEOUT Fukushima lays bare Japanese media's ties to top By DAVID MCNEILL Special to The Japan Times Is the ongoing crisis surrounding the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant being accurately reported in the Japanese media? Official lines: Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano on April 17, 2011, during his first visit to Fukushima after the disasters triggered by March 11's Great East Japan Earthquake. KYODO PHOTO No, says independent journalist Shigeo Abe, who claims the authorities, and many journalists, have done a poor job of informing people about nuclear power in Japan both before and during the crisis — and that the clean-up costs are now being massively underestimated and underreported. "The government says that as long as the radioactive leak can be dammed from the sides it can be stopped, but that's wrong," Abe insists. "They're going to have to build a huge trench underneath the plant to contain the radiation — a giant diaper. That is a huge-scale construction and will cost a fortune. The government knows that but won't reveal it." The disaster at the Fukushima plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) again revealed one of the major fault lines of Japanese journalism — that between the mainstream media and the mass-selling weeklies and their ranks of freelancers. The mainstream media has long been part of the press-club system, which funnels information from official Japan to the public. Critics say the system locks the country's most influential journalists into a symbiotic relationship with their sources, and discourages them from investigation or independent lines of analysis. Once the crisis began, it was weekly Japanese magazines that sank their teeth into the guardians of the so-called nuclear village — the cozy ranks of polititicians, bureaucrats, academics, corporate players and the media who promote nuclear power in this country. Shukan Shincho dubbed Tepco's management "war criminals." Shukan Gendai named and shamed the most culpable of Japan's goyō gakusha (unquestioning pronuclear scientists; aka academic flunkies). Meanwhile, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper's well-respected weekly magazine AERA revealed that local governments manipulated public opinion in support of reopening nuclear plants. The same magazine's now-famous March 19, 2011, cover story showing a masked nuclear worker and the headline "Radiation is coming to Tokyo" was controversial enough to force an apology and the resignation of at least one columnist (though the headline was in fact correct). Others explored claims of structural bias in the mainstream press. Japan's power-supply industry, collectively, is Japan's biggest advertiser, spending ¥88 billion (more than $1 billion) a year, according to the Nikkei Advertising Research Institute. Tepco's ¥24.4 billion alone is roughly half what a global firm as large as Toyota spends in a year. Many journalists were tied to the industry in complex ways. A Yomiuri Shimbun science writer was cited in "Daishinsai Genpatsu Jiko to Media" ("The Media and the Nuclear Disaster"; Otsuki Shoten, 2011) as working simultaneously for nuclear-industry watchdogs, including the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (sic). Journalists from the Nikkei and Mainichi Shimbun newspapers have also reportedly gone on to work for pronuclear organizations and publications. Before the Fukushima crisis began, Tepco's advertising largesse may have helped silence even the most liberal of potential critics. According to Shukan Gendai, the utility spent roughly $26 million on advertising with the Asahi Shimbun. Tepco's quarterly magazine, Sola, was edited by former Asahi writers. The financial clout of the power-supply industry, combined with the press-club system, surely helped discourage investigative reporting and keep concerns about nuclear power and critics of plants such as the aging Fukushima complex and Chubu Electric Power Co.'s Hamaoka facility in Omaezaki, Shizuoka Prefecture, which sits astride numerous faults, well below the media radar. Throughout the Fukushima crisis, the mainstream media has relied heavily on pronuclear scientists' and Tepco's analyses of what was occurring. After the first hydrogen blast of March 12, the government's top spokesman, Yukio Edano, told a press conference: "Even though the reactor No. 1 building is damaged, the containment vessel is undamaged. ... On the contrary, the outside monitors show that the (radiation) dose rate is declining, so the cooling of the reactor is proceeding." Any suggestion that the accident would reach Chernobyl level was, he said, "out of the question." Author and nuclear critic Takashi Hirose noted afterward: "Most of the media believed this. It makes no logical sense to say, as Edano did, that the safety of the containment vessel could be determined by monitoring the radiation dose rate. All he did was repeat the lecture given him by Tepco." As media critic Toru Takeda later wrote, the overwhelming strategy throughout the crisis, by both the authorities and big media, seems to be to reassure people, not alert them to possible dangers. By late March, the war in Libya had knocked Japan from the front pages of the world's newspapers, but there was still one story that was very sought after: life inside the 20-km evacuation zone around the Fukushima atomic plant. Thousands of people had fled and left behind homes, pets and farm animals that would eventually die. A small number of mainly elderly people stayed behind, refusing to leave homes that often had been in their families for generations. Not surprisingly, there was enormous global interest in their story and its disturbing echoes of the Chernobyl catastrophe 25 years earlier. Yet not a single reporter from Japan's big media filed from inside the evacuation zone — despite the fact that it was not yet illegal to be there. Some would begin reporting from the area much later after receiving government clearance — the Asahi Shimbun newspaper sent its first dispatch on April 25, when its reporters accompanied the commissioner-general of the National Police Agency. Later, they would explain why they stayed away and — with the exception of government-approved excursions — why they continue to stay away. Smoke signals: The leaking Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on March 20, 2011. Critics accuse Japan's mainstream media of failing to properly report the ongoing crisis. KYODO PHOTO "Journalists are employees and their companies have to protect them from dangers," explained Keiichi Sato, a deputy editor with the News Division of Nippon TV. "Reporters like myself might want to go into that zone and get the story, and there was internal debate about it, but there isn't much personal freedom inside big media companies. We were told by our superiors that it was dangerous, so going in by ourselves would mean breaking that rule. It would mean nothing less than quitting the company." The cartel-like behavior of the leading Japanese media companies meant they did not have to fear being trumped by rivals. In particularly dangerous situations, managers of TV networks and newspapers will form agreements (known as hōdō kyōtei) in effect to collectively keep their reporters out of harm's way. Teddy Jimbo, founder of the pioneering Internet broadcaster Video News Network, explains: "Once the five or six big firms come to an agreement that their competitors will not do anything, they don't have to be worried about being scooped or challenged." Frustrated by the lack of information from around the plant, Jimbo took his camera and dosimeters into the 20-km zone on April 2 and uploaded a report on YouTube that scored almost 1 million views. He was the first Japanese reporter to present TV images from Futaba and other abandoned towns (though images from the zone, shot during government-approved incursions, later appeared on mainstream TV news programs). "For freelance journalists, it's not hard to beat the big companies because you quickly learn where their line is," Jimbo said. "As a journalist I needed to go in and find out what was happening. Any real journalist would want to do that." He later sold some of his footage to three of the big Japanese TV networks: NHK, NTV and TBS. Says Abe: "The government's whole strategy for bringing the plant under control will have to be revised. The evacuees will never be able to return. They can't clean up the radiation. Will the media report this? I'm waiting for that."

Here is another alternative for a media society:In China Press, Best Coverage Cash Can Buy Though banned in China, paying for positive news coverage is so widespread that many publications and broadcasters have rate cards listing prices. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/business/media/flattering-news-coverage-has-a-price-in-china.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2_20120404

This is a better balance and opens up a problem to a wider discussion on need to know and feel that journalism is supposed to answer. 27 Comments 20 Mar 2012 4:17 PM Mike Daisey, climate, and greater truths By David Roberts Mike Daisey. (Photo by Aaron Webb.) I wasn’t going to write anything about the Mike Daisey affair — Grist’s own editor Scott Rosenberg said what needed to be said — but the tone of the subsequent coverage, the high dudgeon and hand-wringing and self-congratulation among American journalists and commentators, has rubbed me the wrong way. So, perhaps ill-advisedly, I’m jumping in. Daisey did something as old as theater itself: manipulated facts in service of narrative. He rearranged events, put himself in scenes he never actually witnessed, and collapsed people into composite characters, all in the name of telling a gripping and meaningful story. That’s all fine, of course, if you’re just doing theater and the audience knows what it’s getting. The problem, as Ira Glass points out in This American Life‘s extraordinary retraction episode (and as New York Times media critic David Carr echoes), is that the people who went to see Daisey’s show, or heard it on TAL, were under the impression that they were hearing an exposé, a piece of personal journalism. They thought they were hearing about stuff that really happened to Daisey. And he let them think that, even encouraged them to. He shouldn’t have done that! (As usual, James Fallows puts it best.) The costs of what he did have been well-rehearsed by now. He sacrificed his own credibility and dinged the credibility of This American Life. For many, that seems to be the end of the story. But I don’t think we can ignore the fact that he also achieved something worthwhile. He produced benefits unique to storytelling — not just that he made thousands of Americans aware of Chinese factory conditions (conditions even his critics concede are dismal), but that he made them care about it, at least a little. He elicited an emotional investment in a way that American “objective journalism” has difficulty doing. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? If you could go back and erase the net effects of Daisey’s show, would you? The easy way to answer this dilemma is to pretend it isn’t one, to assert, as Max Fisher of The Atlantic does, that “by lying, Daisey undermined the cause he purported to advance.” If that’s true, of course we can condemn the entire affair with a clear conscience. But it just doesn’t strike me as plausible. The discussion over the plight of Chinese factory workers is now well underway, bolstered by pieces in mainstream media that appeared subsequent to Daisey’s show. I doubt the kerfuffle over Daisey’s personal experiences — which is mostly of interest to media nerds — is going to have much effect on that discussion. (At the very least, assertions to the contrary should be backed by some data or analysis, which I haven’t seen.) The awkward fact remains that Chinese factory workers have a moral claim on us and Daisey did real and pioneering work making us feel it. That achievement may be tarnished now, but it has not been erased. It’s worth asking how to eliminate the costs of what Daisey did, how to tell his story without inaccuracies or better to calibrate audience expectations. But it’s also worth asking how to preserve and replicate the value of what Daisey did. Journalists have been patting themselves on the back that they never make stuff up and can’t condone anyone else doing it. (Devotees of the last dozen years’ U.S. media will detect a whiff of irony here.) But they should also be asking themselves why it took Daisey to grapple with this issue seriously and create a vehicle for broader emotional engagement with it. (This is to take nothing from the great NYT investigative piece that came out after Daisey’s show.) We could start by getting past the kind of black-and-white moralism of David Carr’s question: Is it O.K. to lie on the way to telling a greater truth? The short answer is also the right one. No. Telling the literal truth is always and everywhere more important than telling a good story. So much for Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, I guess. But put that aside. Even taking Carr’s stricture as gospel, demonstrable lies — “I met an old guy with gnarled hands and showed him an iPad” when I didn’t — are an easy case. It doesn’t get us very far. There are more things under the sun than lies and truth. It’s a weird and naive notion that there is a bright line between objective and subjective, fact and opinion, reality and narrative. Post-war journalism in the U.S. has been besotted with this kind of technocratic positivism, the notion that a reporter’s job is to convey facts and that anything else is personal opinion, bias, or outright deception. But facts are not truth. Facts do not, in and of themselves, have meaning. Facts only add up to something — literally make sense — when they are embedded in some kind of framework or narrative that fits into our cultural identities and ways of seeing the world. That’s how humans are built to learn, going back to the Stone Age. So “telling a greater truth” is a thing of real value, not some theatrical pretense. Helping people understand and contextualize events, work through the meaning and resonance of the facts, is a humanistic endeavor, and in today’s fraught and complex world, there’s never been a greater need for it. Much of the mainstream media seems to have forsworn that task. But “just the facts” is a pretense. There is no such thing. If the story, the narrative framework, isn’t explicit, it’s implicit. And if it’s implicit, it usually reflects status quo interests. I see no particular nobility in that. So a lie isn’t OK in service of telling a greater truth. What is OK? How do we value the benefits of storytelling — meaning and resonance — relative to the benefits of precision and rigor? There are endless fuzzy borderline cases, bits of approximation, generalization, interpretation, or poetic license. It’s too easy to say there’s no tension. The reason this tension is on my mind has to do, you won’t be surprised to hear, with climate change. One of the striking things about climate change is that majorities of Americans accept it, on some level or other, but it is those who reject it, largely in the conservative base, who display the most intensity. They’re the ones who call their representatives and go to town halls and write letters to the editor and get in a reactionary fury over f’ing light bulbs. Why is that? One reason is that conservatives have been told a story. They have not been given science lectures by Al Gore and James Hansen, instructed on ocean pH and ice sheet volumes and parts per million of CO2. They’ve been told by their media outlets, analysts, and politicians what climate change means: It is part of the liberal plan to control your behavior and expand government. It is elite condescension, high taxes, and global governance. That’s a story that carries great emotional resonance for its audience. What story have those outside the conservative base been told? There is no such story. Or rather, there are several conflicting, obscure, half-told stories that don’t add up to anything. Americans don’t yet know how to make sense of climate change. We have access to the facts but we don’t yet understand the greater truths. That’s why it remains such an abstraction to most of the public and so absent from the passions and preoccupations of most American journalists and pundits. Daisey sacrificed accuracy for meaning. Too much journalism does the opposite. We desperately need storytellers who can give the facts about climate change life and meaning, people who can get at those greater truths. Journalists could be part of that.

And this is another great debate in Journalism. Fact or fiction actually seems a no brainer in journalism but apparently not. Take a look at this coverage from Slate on 'This American Life' and further on were fiction might fit in our world of excitement and drama: This American Life Retracts Its Apple Exposé - In a surprising turn of events, This American Life announced this afternoon that it is retracting its exposé of the working conditions at Apple’s factories in China. The show will address the retraction in this week’s episode, in which they’ll devote an entire hour to the subject. The episode will go up tonight, a couple days earlier than most episodes, which are usually posted on Sunday. They explained the decision on the episode’s page: Regrettably, we have discovered that one of our most popular episodes was partially fabricated. This week, we devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in "Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory," Mike Daisey’s story about visiting Foxconn, an Apple supplier factory in China. Rob Schmitz, a reporter for Marketplace, raises doubts on much of Daisey's story . . . Ira also talks with Mike Daisey about why he misled This American Life during the fact-checking process. And we end the show separating fact from fiction, when it comes to Apple's manufacturing practices in China. In a statement on his website, monologist Mike Daisey, whose one-man show provided the basis for the episode, explained that he was standing by his work: My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity … What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic ­- not a theatrical ­- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China. In another statement on the radio show’s blog, host Ira Glass insisted, “Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows … in this case, we did not live up to those standards.” But while This American Life has been putting out great work for years, the idea that it’s “essentially a journalistic . . . enterprise” seems debatable. The show frequently excerpts and reproduces fictional short stories, pieces of memoir, and stories told at storytelling events like those held by The Moth. In fact, this isn’t the first time This American Life has been the subject of an unsolicited fact-check. Writing for Slate in 2008, Jack Shafer found that a Malcolm Gladwell story from The Moth, reproduced on an episode of This American Life, was “mostly bunk.” That story recounted (supposed) personal hijinks of Gladwell’s, and didn’t take on one of the world’s largest and most admired corporations, so perhaps different standards apply. Those standards, in any case, continue to be debated. This American Life’s retraction comes amidst an ongoing debate about whether nonfiction storytellers, when they’re not calling themselves journalists, are bound to tell the truth. Creative nonfiction luminary John D’Agata has defended writers' right to fudge the truth in his book The Lifespan of a Fact, co-written with fact-checker Jim Fingal. (Dan Kois expressed mixed feelings about the book when reviewing it for Slate.) D’Agata’s book brought to mind, for many, the various partly true memoirs of the last ten years. For more on this story, head over to This American Life’s press release. To read the investigation that led to the retraction, stay tuned for Rob Schmitz’s story for Marketplace. For more on working conditions at Apple’s suppliers, read the New York Times’s special report.

This is from the very good LanguageLog Blog at http://networkedblogs.com/veD3P, and you should subscribe to it or at least keep and eye on it. Language Log HomeAboutComments policy Journalism 101: a passive fact-check March 16, 2012 @ 3:49 am · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Syntax, passives « previous post | A furious Daniel Schwammenthal at The Commentator excoriates The Economist for accusing the Israeli government of being delusional and paranoid. Asking rhetorically why there continues to be conflict between Israel and the Palestinians according to The Economist’s view, Schwammenthal adds a linguistic element to his political critique: "Violent clashes and provocations erupted whenever the peace process seemed on the verge of concrete steps forward," the Economist explains. And, as Journalism 101 courses explain, the passive voice erupts whenever the journalist is trying to obscure the truth. Violence did not spontaneously or anonymously break out, as the article suggests. And he goes on to hammer home the point that it's the Palestinians who fire the rockets. Well, it's true that Journalism 101 courses often follow grammatically clueless critics in their prejudice against the passive, and in wrongly associating the passive voice with deviousness and mendacity. But I hope there are at least some journalism teachers who can tell passive clauses from active ones. Schwammenthal evidently can't. "Violent clashes and provocations erupted" is not a passive clause. Nor is "Violence spontaneously and anonymously broke out." These are simple active clauses with intransitive verbs. I dimly recall that Language Log has occasionally raised this matter before (though not more than about 65 times, according to this list of relevant posts), so I won't belabor the point. (If I was going to belabor it, I would point out that Language Log has actually noted previous false allegations of passive clauses being used to mask Palestinian violence while emphasizing Israeli aggression.) I will just ask a question: What on earth induces people who cannot tell passive clauses from active ones to pontificate about passive syntax when attacking other writers? It's like accusing an arriving politician of luxury travel in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental when he is visibly climbing out of the driving seat of a used Chevy Nova. Wouldn't you expect people to put their glasses on and actually check the make and model of the car, or look for the chauffeur? (Oh, I don't know, maybe not, in an election year.) [Comments are open. They're not, of course, but I'm just demonstrating how weird it is when people say things that you can easily see are flatly false.] March 16, 2012 @ 3:49 am · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Syntax, passives

Cutting edge Journalism: The Three Little Pigs And The Future Of Journalism www.npr.org In an action-packed, two-minute remake of the classic tale, The Guardian of London introduces us to "Open Journalism," where newsgatherers are inviting readers to participate in the increasingly raw and loud new media landscape. http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/03/05/147977288/the-three-little-pigs-and-the-future-of-journalsim?sc=fb&cc=fp

/Users/richardsonclark/Desktop/colvin22.jpg Marie Colvin Died In Syria While Exposing 'The Horrors Of War'

(NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro remembers journalist Marie Colvin, who died Wednesday in Syria.) We were exhausted after a long hot day of reporting. Tripoli had just fallen, and it was almost sunset. We pulled up to the house of Muatassim Gadhafi, one of Moammar Gadhafi's most feared and loathed sons. Even though we were all much younger than Marie Colvin, we were discussing calling it a day without venturing inside, as night was falling and, frankly, we were tired. But Marie quickly clambered up the ladder helpfully provided by local residents to scale the massive wall encircling the property. We reluctantly followed.

As I have said before, radio is not the hot media it is in North America. CBC in Canada is excellent and listed to by a large percentage of the population. In isolated rural areas of the country it is highly valued. North Americans still mostly drive cars to work and they listen to the radio while driving. Not so much on the train. The point of this being that there is an excellent 'How to' from NPR and This American Life in America:Radio: An Illustrated Guide store.thisamericanlife.org :it's a step-by-step primer on how to make a radio story. The book includes detail on where we find our stories, how to structure a story, how to do an interview, how to hold the microphone, how to edit sound, how to write a script...really everything you'd need to get started And as a PDF to download it costs $2.00 a bargain.

Great bunch of steam rising over silicon valley over the last few weeks and here is a great summary of what it is all about:Understanding the Controversy Over Silicon Valley's 'Journalism' Can you trust writers who have a financial stake in the companies they cover? CHRISTOPHER MIMS 02/14/2012 2 COMMENTS Dan Lyons, tech journalist at Newsweek (and doer of that other thing) thinks that people who write about companies in which they are investors can't be objective about them. But he couched his argument in the language of a baroquely vicious personal attack, which means the comments of every post on the subject from now to eternity are going to include at least a half dozen of those Michael Jackson eating popcorn gifs and will mostly miss the point. (His headline, for those who didn't bother to click through: "Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool") What's remarkable here isn't that a senior writer at Newsweek has picked a fight with some of America's best known technology bloggers, one the founder of TechCrunch and the other its best-known writer. After all, MG Siegler and Michael Arrington's ascension from scribes to investors has already occasioned much hand-wringing in the tech press. (Mostly because: Investors in who write about companies they invest in as if they're disinterested third parties = what?) Rather, what you should be paying attention to, after you get past all the ad-hominem attacks flying on both sides of this "debate," is the fact that Siegler's and Arrington's responses don't actually address the (admittedly, much-obscured) core of Lyons's attacks on their work: Namely, that they don't have clue one what any attempt at objectivity could possibly be for. Josh Brown sums it up nicely: "Reporters in Silicon Valley get scoops on the startups THEY HAVE THEIR OWN MONEY IN. It's hilarious, like if ESPN also owned the Lakers … Can you imagine if the anchors on CNBC were invested in an IPO and the reporters at the WSJ were shorting it? Insanity." It's easy to dismiss all attempts to put oneself at a remove from the subject of a story. After all, everyone who writes about technology has their preferences—companies we like and don't, and our tastes change over time. What the liberation from old models of objectivity brought us was an escape from the View from Nowhere— that is, the notion that we aren't all biased to begin with, or that we shouldn't disclose it. But wearing your biases on your sleeve doesn't mean you don't have them, or that talking about them is sufficient to inoculate readers against the most pernicious form of delusion there is: your own self-delusion. The temptation to mislead oneself is the reason that journalists aren't, for example, supposed to invest in companies they cover. It's a foundational rule not because people who write about corporations for a living are suckers who all wish they could make money like the industry players they cover—it's because it's too easy to rationalize away a conflict of interest when it aligns perfectly with our own advantage. Arrington at least takes a swipe at addressing Lyons's charge of bias by pointing out that he is also often critical of companies in which he invests. If I was the person that Dan Lyons says I am, I would be a psychopath. I don’t understand why he wouldn’t even consider the fact that I’m simply speaking my mind. That I’ve always just spoken my mind. That I’ve never been the type of person to not speak my mind. There’s no way to look at my record and think that I am somehow a “hack for hire.” Of course, simply "speaking your mind" is no guarantee against self-delusion, either. It seems that Arrington and Siegler think that speaking from the heart is the ultimate route to the truth, which is a fine thing to believe when you're young and naive and unfamiliar with the myriad ways that we compartmentalize our thoughts, revise our view of the past and reconstruct a present narrative that suits however we're feeling about the world and ourselves on that particular day. On one level, I admire this line of reasoning. It's writing with a voice -- and a history and a context and a face— that has revived analysis and even (improbably) the essay in the digital medium, and many of the finest practitioners of this art owe an unacknowledged debt to the deliberately self-unschooled "hacks" who first started throwing brickbats from outside what used to meaningfully be called the mainstream media. But when Siegler and Arrington are going on about how insanely jealous of their success Lyons must be, rather than answering his charge of bias, what their misunderstanding (or misdirection) suggests is that they can only imagine that a writer would be principally motivated, as they are, by what appears to be simple greed.

In Business Lie and Die

There has been an on going discussion of the outside influences on news organizations and the fact that large organizations are owned and controlled by an elite group on people. This is often seen as negative, however if that elite group of owners recognizes the value of a free press they leave editorial decisions up to their professional editorial staff. Recently we have seen that is no longer the case and we have a rabid radical right wing agenda strongly influencing editorial content. For example here is a report on what was thought of as a reputable news organization which has blatantly moved from news to fiction:http://grist.org/climate-skeptics/the-wall-street-journals-willful-climate-lies/ CLIMATE SKEPTICS The Wall Street Journal’s willful climate lies 33 BY AUDEN SCHENDLER 1 FEB 2012 6:36 AM It wasn’t surprising that the Wall Street Journal published an error-riddled op-ed about climate change last week, essentially saying it was bunk and we shouldn’t “panic” about it. We’ve gotten used to that. But what has really started to amaze me about that newspaper’s editorial page and the far right is that they now venture beyond delusion or misinformation. They lie, and they know they are lying. That’s a big claim, but how else do you account for the statement that “the earth hasn’t warmed for well over 10 years now” when it is well known by anyone working on climate that 2010 was the hottest year on record? Despite the fact that many of the authors of the article are funded by ExxonMobil through the George C. Marshall Institute, and despite the fact that none of them are leading scientists, they, and the editor of the opinion page, simply had to know that that statement was false. They may be unethical, but they are not stupid. This is new stuff. The claim of “no recent warming” has been made deviously before by taking a snapshot of an upward-sloping zigzag line graph. (If you take a snapshot of an upward zigzag, it can even appear to be going down … ) But rarely before have we seen brazen, unobscured lying in such a prominent location. Usually the lie or misinformation is gussied up just a little bit. It suggests a desperation of sorts, as Joe Romm pointed out in his masterfully complete debunking. Romm also noted that it brings up some questions. Why would anyone — spaceman, oil industry shill, editor, university professor, or simple citizen — tarnish their name by signing onto an obvious untruth? How does that help their cause? The problem is that willful lies have become the stock in trade of the extreme right. Another example, outside the climate arena, is the notion that if you cut taxes for the wealthy, and cut corporate taxes, the economy booms. Where are the economic or historical studies that say when you cut taxes for the wealthy, it creates jobs or stimulates the economy? Where are the economic or historical studies showing that cutting corporate taxes creates jobs? They don’t exist. And we have a 30-year test period showing that trickle-down economics didn’t work either. So how come people keep claiming it’s true? Another claim in the article is that “a recent study by William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls … ” Well, let’s ask Nordhaus what he thinks of that. In Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog he stridently disagrees with that statement: The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others) … I can only assume they [are] either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings. A whole campaign, a whole half of the country, now believes blindly in multiple falsehoods. On climate, at least, some of the people you can blame for this are the spacemen and oil guys who signed the WSJ op-ed. But opportunities for blame abound. Should MIT sit idly by while a professor of theirs, Richard Lindzen, incorrectly says the planet hasn’t warmed in 12 years? Is that a teacher you want on your staff, a guy who’s missing something that basic, and lazy enough not to correct the record? The most guilty party of all is a fellow named Paul Gigot. He’s the editor of the Wall Street Journal opinion page. And he should be held accountable for knowingly publishing statements both he and his authors understood to be false — in particuar, the lie that the earth has not warmed in the past 12 years. Galileo would have muttered: “But it has.” And because of that, Gigot should resign. Auden Schendler is Vice President of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company. He is the author of Getting Green Done: Hard Truths From the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution (PublicAffairs, 2009).

Great idea, this:http://www.nytimesknownow.com/index.php/journalism-for-high-school-students/?utm_source=nyt&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=HSjourn

Again from the New York Times. Really get this and check out the last paragraph. Censorship is very bad and Turkey's brand is right out of 1984, however shooting Journalists as policy, in Pakistan for example, is truly evil: January 4, 2012 Charges Against Journalists Dim the Democratic Glow in Turkey By DAN BILEFSKY and SEBNEM ARSU ISTANBUL — A year ago, the journalist Nedim Sener was investigating a murky terrorist network that prosecutors maintain was plotting to overthrow Turkey’s Muslim-inspired government. Today, Mr. Sener stands accused of being part of that plot, jailed in what human rights groups call a political purge of the governing party’s critics. Mr. Sener, who has spent nearly 20 years exposing government corruption, is among 13 defendants who appeared in state court this week at the imposing Palace of Justice in Istanbul on a variety of charges related to abetting a terrorist organization. The other defendants include the editors of a staunchly secular Web site critical of the government and Ahmet Sik, a journalist who has written that an Islamic movement associated with Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive cleric living in Pennsylvania, has infiltrated Turkey’s security forces. At a time when Washington and Europe are praising Turkey as the model of Muslim democracy for the Arab world, Turkish human rights advocates say the crackdown is part of an ominous trend. Most worrying, they say, are fresh signs that the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is repressing freedom of the press through a mixture of intimidation, arrests and financial machinations, including the sale in 2008 of a leading newspaper and a television station to a company linked to the prime minister’s son-in-law. The arrests threaten to darken the image of Mr. Erdogan, who is lionized in the Middle East as a powerful regional leader who can stand up to Israel and the West. Widely credited with taming Turkey’s military and forging a religiously conservative government that marries strong economic growth with democracy and religious tolerance, he has proved prickly and thin-skinned on more than one occasion. It is that sensitivity bordering on arrogance, human rights advocates say, that contributes to his animus against the news media. There are now 97 members of the news media in jail in Turkey, including journalists, publishers and distributors, according to the Turkish Journalists’ Union, a figure that rights groups say exceeds the number detained in China. The government denies the figure and insists that with the exception of four cases, those arrested have all been charged with activities other than reporting. Turkey’s justice minister, Sadullah Ergin, last month blamed civic groups for creating the false impression that there were too many journalists in jail in Turkey. He said a new plan to enhance freedom of expression this year would alter perceptions. In court on Wednesday, a defiant Mr. Sener, looking gaunt and pale, blamed the police officials he had investigated for setting him up. “It has been 11 months that I have not been given the chance to utter a single word to defend myself,” he said, speaking to friends during a brief intermission. “I have been a victim in a revenge operation — nothing else.” The European Human Rights Court received nearly 9,000 complaints against Turkey for breaches of press freedom and freedom of expression in 2011, compared with 6,500 in 2009. In March, Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, was fined about $3,670 for his statement in a Swiss newspaper that “we have killed 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians.” Human rights advocates say they fear that with the Arab Spring lending new regional influence to Turkey, the United States and Europe are turning a blind eye to encroaching authoritarianism there. “Turkey’s democracy may be a good benchmark when compared with Egypt, Libya or Syria,” said Hakan Altinay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But the whole region will suffer if Turkey is allowed to disregard the values of liberal democracy.” Among the most glaring breaches of press freedom, human rights advocates say, was the arrest of Mr. Sener, 45, a German-born reporter who was working for the newspaper Milliyet at the time of his arrest. In 2010 he won the International Press Institute’s World Press Freedom Hero award for his reporting on the murder of Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated in Istanbul in 2007. Mr. Sener said he believed that he was in jail because he dared to write a book criticizing the Turkish state’s negligence in failing to prevent Mr. Dink’s murder. His defense team says the prosecution’s case rests on spurious evidence, including a file bearing his name that an independent team of computer engineers concluded had been mysteriously installed by a virus on a computer belonging to OdaTV, an antigovernment Web site. He was held for seven months without charges. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in jail. “Nedim Sener is being accused on the basis of rumors and fantasies,” said his lawyer, Yucel Dosemeci. “He is being targeted to create a culture of fear.” In late December, Turkey drew fresh criticism after the police detained at least 38 people, many of them journalists, saying they had possible links to a Kurdish separatist group. But critics say dozens have been arrested whose only offense was to have expressed general support for the rights of Kurds, a long-oppressed minority here. Over the past year, the government has been arresting prominent critics like Mr. Sener, as well as dozens of current and former military personnel, intellectuals and politicians who have been linked to what officials say was a plot to overthrow the government by an organization called Ergenekon. Four years into the investigation, no one among the more than 300 suspects charged in the case has been convicted, even though courts have heard more than 8,000 pages worth of indictments, many of them based on transcripts of surreptitiously recorded private telephone conversations. Advocates for press freedom say that the government has also moved to mute opposition by using punitive fines and by intimidating the ownership of leading media companies. In a celebrated case in 2009, the Dogan media group, a large conglomerate, was saddled with a $2.5 billion fine by the Tax Ministry for unpaid taxes. Dogan officials say privately that the real reason was that its publications had given prominent attention to a series of corruption scandals involving senior government officials. The European Union has expressed concerns about the chilling effect of the fine, which was negotiated down to about $621 million, officials familiar with the case say, as part of a tax amnesty issued last year. Now, some journalists who work for the Dogan group say there is an unwritten rule not to criticize the governing party. Mr. Erdogan, who has previously called on his supporters to boycott the Dogan group, strongly denied any political motives behind the fine. After Mr. Erdogan swept to power in 2002, human rights activists initially lauded him for expanding free speech. But after an unsuccessful attempt by the secular opposition to ban Mr. Erdogan’s party in 2008, critics say, Mr. Erdogan embarked on a systematic campaign to silence his opponents. They say the curbs on press freedom also reflect the fact that Turkey no longer feels obligated to adhere to Western norms at a time when it is playing the role of regional leader and its talks on joining the European Union are in disarray. Mr. Sener and Mr. Sik were defiant in March as police officers took them into custody at their homes before television cameras. “Whoever touches it gets burned!” Mr. Sik shouted, referring to the Gulen movement, whose members, analysts say, have infiltrated the highest levels of the country’s police and judiciary. In March, the unpublished manuscript of Mr. Sik’s book on the movement, “The Army of the Imam,” was confiscated by police officers. But the police were unable to stop its publication on the Internet, where at least 20,000 users downloaded it. While the Internet has become the main weapon against censorship, more than 15,000 Web sites have been blocked by the state, according to engelliweb.com, which tracks restricted pages. For more than two years until last fall, YouTube was banned on the grounds that some videos on the site were insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The monitoring agency last summer called on Web sites to ban 138 words, including “animal,” “erotic” and “zoo” in English and “fat,” “blonde” and “skirt” in Turkish. It is a tribute to Turkey’s still vibrant media culture that the prohibition inspired an online competition to create the best short story out of the banned words. My PS Orwell in his novel 1984 had it right and less then three decades short, gives me a shiver