CyberCats

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Someone was asking for the Spring syllubus for this course, well here it is:
ADVANCED WRITING JOURNALISM

Clark Richardson - Instructor

SYLLABUS SPRING:

At the beginning of each class review new items posted on the class blog for discussion and further research. http://cybercats.blogspot.com/

First Class: Introduction to the class and format and review of syllabus content. Set up student blog accounts. What are the responsibilities of the press in a free country? What about a repressive country (Fifth column). Newspapers and wire services, Unit 1 “Journalism English Today”. Key Vocabulary: News Media Words. News writing. What is news (definitions) what are the readers interested in and what should they be interested in? Time sensitive, hot news. Background research stories. Future news: business forecasts, weather, and horoscopes. Small markets versus big markets. Assignment: Write and e-mail me a hot news item for campus market.

Second Class: What makes a story news. The structure of a news story, Unit 4 Journalism English Today. Disasters and Accidents the good news and the bad news, which do you, want first? News Video introduction. Key vocabulary: The Economy and the Stock Markets. Local, National and International news. What is she? Who is she? What did she do? Campus walk – looking for a story. Find it research it and write it. Distribute blog address to students. Introduce the class blog.

Third Class: Broadcast News. Broadcasting words. Unit 9 in Journalism English Today. The difference between Published media and broadcast media. Talking heads and doorknobs. Radio assignment – Podcasting and sound files. News Writing Video (No. 1-5). Video: “Up Close and Personal” first 15 minutes.

Fourth Class: Pros and cons of T.V., radio, newspapers, magazines, internet sources, news blogs and the on-line press. What’s a lead and what is a lead story? Past, present (time loaded) and future. Obituary story. News Writing Video. Second part of “Up Close and Personal”. Reserve video cameras from Media Center. Show students videotape to buy.

Fifth Class: Review blog postings. What makes a powerful video story? Third part of “Up Close and Personal”. Video assignment. Video groups assignment. News Writing Video.

Sixth Class: How to pick the story. How to research the story (News Writing Video). Sources and how they should be treated. How to tell the story (Vocabulary for print and broadcast news). Unit 9 Broadcast News “Journalism English Today” Continue video assignment media editing in Media center.

Seventh Class: Internet news and papers in other countries. International Organizations. Key vocabulary Unit 11 “Journalism English Today”. E-news , blogs and the filter function of conventional media. Who picks and who decides on what is news. Different in big and small markets, different in media type. News Writing Video. Forth part of ‘Up Close and Personal.

Eighth Class: Headlines and headline words – Thesaurus. Headlining your story. Media leads for your story. Unit 5 English in Headlines “Journalism English Today”. KILL in the paper press. Last section “Up Close and Personal”. Interview techniques first worksheet and classroom practice.

Ninth Class: Class review of student’s news videos. Class review of student audio files. Compare and critique. Critical art, music, movie review.

Tenth Class: Culture and sports. How are they different in structure and vocabulary? News Writing Video. Assignment – Sports story. Kiss and tell.

Eleventh Class: Writing and reporting –coaching the writer, focus the reporter. News Writing Video. Reporting the same story for different media, Units 12 – 13 Journalism English Today. A science story assignment.

Twelfth Class: A news nose and fire engine chasing. Asking all the questions and then what to do with the answers. Respecting and protecting sources.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Write this down in your schedule: Our Asahi Newspaper Tour will be on Monday June 19th at 1 p.m. so plan for it. Clark

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Take a look at the Weekly Spin:
THE WEEKLY SPIN, April 19, 2006

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THIS WEEK'S NEWS

== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. The Media War and Journalist Thought Crimes
2. Essential2: Better Flacking Through Chemistry
3. U.S. Public Diplomacy Goes South
4. Holy Product Placement, Batman!
5. Crunch Time for School Junk Food?
6. CNN Features Real News About Fake TV News
7. K Street to Get a TM?
8. Public Service or War Propaganda?

----------------------------------------------------------------------

== SPIN OF THE DAY ==

1. THE MEDIA WAR AND JOURNALIST THOUGHT CRIMES
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002345682
"When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared on Rush
Limbaugh's talk radio show" recently, he made several remarks "on
the subject of press coverage in Iraq" that have mostly escaped
notice, writes Editor and Publisher. Rumsfeld said that "the
terrorists, Zarqawi and bin Laden and Zawahiri, those people have
media committees. They are actively out there trying to manipulate
the press in the United States. ... They're much better at
(laughing) managing those kinds of things than we are." He also
said, "There have been far fewer journalists who have stepped up to
become embedded" with military units in Iraq. One reporter told
Rumsfeld that the perception was that embedded journalists "were
really part of the problem." Rumsfeld commented, "I think that's an
inexcusable thought."
SOURCE: Editor and Publisher, April 18, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4739

2. ESSENTIAL2: BETTER FLACKING THROUGH CHEMISTRY
http://www.prweek.com/us/features/article/554052/Honeywell+sees+wisdom+joint+effort+Nobel+Media/
Working with Ogilvy PR, the American Chemistry Council (ACC)
launched its "Essential2" PR campaign last year, "to reposition the
$550 billion industry as not only imperative, but advantageous to
all aspects of modern life." Essential2 includes "national cable TV
spots, print ads, and a policymaker education program." PR Week
profiles the campaign's outreach to chemical company employees. ACC
named "campaign coordinators at each of its 129 member companies"
and provided them with "articles on topics ranging from chemistry's
role in preventing house fires to keeping NASCAR drivers safe." ACC
also designed an online "employee ambassador" kit with tips on "how
to discuss the benefits of chemistry, write educational letters to
the editor, contact government officials, and generate school and
community group speaking opportunities." ACC members include Dow
Corning, Bayer, DuPont and Carus Chemical, which hosted an employee
ice cream social where "ACC's MTV-style motivational video screened
as entertainment."
SOURCE: PR Week (sub req'd), April 17, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4738

3. U.S. PUBLIC DIPLOMACY GOES SOUTH
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/14368770.htm
The U.S. State Department's Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy,
Karen Hughes, has "launched a campaign to make her government
simpatico" to Latin America. Last month, Hughes visited Brazil,
Panama, El Salvador, Chile and Colombia. She wants to make U.S. aid
in the region "more visible and higher profile." Latin American
countries are receiving "more money for student and youth exchange
programs, as part of a worldwide effort to bring young people into
the United States." Hughes explained, "I'm focused particularly on
young people and those who influence them." Other changes include
adding eight regional public diplomacy officers, "to write up press
releases, manage cultural and student exchanges and attend speaking
events," and using the State Department's "rapid-response unit" to
help ambassadors respond to breaking news. A recent poll found
"three out of every five Latin Americans distrust the United
States."
SOURCE: Miami Herald, April 18, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4737

4. HOLY PRODUCT PLACEMENT, BATMAN!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114532350031828284.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace
"Product placement has become commonplace in movies and TV shows.
Now it's coming to comic books -- in part because the industry's two
giants, DC and Marvel, are promoting some of their titles as places
to reach one of Madison Avenue's most elusive audiences: guys in
their 20s," reports Brian Steinberg. DC Comics' new miniseries,
called "Rush City," will have "visible promotional support from
General Motors Corp.'s Pontiac." The series' hero will drive a
Pontiac Solstice. Marvel Entertainment "has begun putting the
'swoosh' logo from Nike Inc. in the scenes of some of its titles,
such as 'New X-Men.' So far, the emblem has appeared on a car door
and on a character's T-shirt." Marvel also signed a deal with
DaimlerChrysler, in which the new Dodge Caliber may be featured in
their comic books' cityscapes, "on billboards, T-shirts or signs
over the next four to eight months."
SOURCE: Wall Street Journal (sub req'd), April 18, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4736

5. CRUNCH TIME FOR SCHOOL JUNK FOOD?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0604140127apr14,1,6207503,print.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
U.S. Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), a frequent proponent of
legislation protecting children, is now taking on a formidable
opponent: the snack industry. Matthew Chayes reports that Harkin has
introduced legislation that would tighten the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) definition for "foods of minimal nutritional
value." Harken wants USDA guidelines to limit saturated fat, trans
fat, added sugar and other bad stuff in schools, instead of
filtering foods by their nutrients. Aside from advocating voluntary
guidlines, industry groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom say
the problem isn't the food, it's the kids and parents. Industry
consultant Lisa Katic told the Tribune, "The industry's not going to
support a bill that's not showing results." She added that children
need more pushups, not less fat or sugar. Kelly Brownell, director
of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, told the New
York Times that he fears "that the food industry, with the soft
drink industry taking the lead, will work its hardest to weaken or
kill this act."
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, April 14, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4735

6. CNN FEATURES REAL NEWS ABOUT FAKE TV NEWS
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/reliable.sources/
Our groundbreaking exposé "Fake TV News: Widespread and
Undisclosed" continues to make waves. Dan Price, co-author of the
report with CMD's Diane Farsetta, was interviewed Sunday, April 16,
by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post on his CNN Reliable Sources
program. Federal Communications Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein was
also interviewed and pledged bipartisan action from the FCC. Dan
Price is a CMD research consultant and novelist who has his own
website. If you click here you can view on Dan's site his appearance
on CNN' s Reliable Sources. It's some of the best news you will ever
watch and yes, it is real. Our colleagues at Free Press have made it
easy for you to contact the FCC to ask the agency to investigate
this abuse of the public airwaves and to penalize stations that
break the law by deceiving their audiences with undisclosed fake
news. Act today, and ask five friends to do the same.
SOURCE: CNN's Reliable Sources, April 16, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4734

7. K STREET TO GET A TM?
http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/041206/news2.html
While "most other Republicans" are avoiding the phrase K Street
Project, following lobbyist Jack Abramoff's January agreement to
plead guilty to corruption charges, Grover Norquist is seeking to
trademark it. Norquist's organization, Americans for Tax Reform,
runs the project as what he describes as "an innocuous list of job
openings for Washington lobbyists and a database of lobbyists'
political ties and federal campaign contributions. The lists are
circulated among high-level conservatives, with critics calling the
efforts an improper 'whitelisting' and 'blacklisting' of potential
hires," reports The Hill. Norquist says the K Street Project, which
he founded in 1989, has been wrongly described as "a nefarious
practice of Republican lawmakers pressuring groups to hire
right-leaning employees." Trademarking the phrase will allow
conservatives to "jealously guard the real phrasing" and to "sue
anyone who says it wrong and make lots of money," explained
Norquist.
SOURCE: The Hill, April 12, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4733

8. PUBLIC SERVICE OR WAR PROPAGANDA?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/08/BUGROI5SPN1.DTL&hw=propaganda&sn=001&sc=1000
In early April, "a public-service advertising campaign began ...
encouraging Americans to show support for American troops." The San
Francisco Chronicle asks, "Is it a genuine message of gratitude or
poorly designed advocacy for the war in Iraq?" The non-profit
Advertising Council designed the print, radio and online ads for the
U.S. Defense Department. The spots direct people to the Department's
"America Supports You" website. Some marketing professionals "said
they believe the message crosses into partisan territory." The
founder of Venables, Bell & Partners remarked, "I feel the war
propaganda machine." Ad Council president Ellis Verdi rejected the
criticism, saying, "What's important is that these are 18-year-old
human beings, Americans, who are under stress." The Ad Council was
formed in 1942, to increase support for World War II; its campaigns
from that time include Rosie the Riveter and "Loose Lips Sink
Ships."
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, April 8, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4732

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Here is a copy of Grist which is a daily eco newsletter digging up the dirt on the dirty guys. Look at this issue and if you'd like you could subscribe for free delivery to your own machine if you wanted to.

Thursday, 20 Apr 2006
It's Like Chile, Only Wider
Haven't entered our Great Peru Giveaway yet? What are you waiting for? Sign up today and you could win an eco-trip for two to this lush South American nation.

ADVERTISEMENT

NEW IN GRIST
It's All in the List
Our list of environmental goodies, oddities, and inanities

We thought about being earnest this Earth Day -- compiling some sort of inspiring list of in-the-trenches eco-heroes who need recognition and encouragement -- but then we remembered: we're Grist. So we bring you instead a capricious rundown of our favorite highs, lows, and wacky bits of the last year. Who's the hottest eco-model? The mustachiest geo-green? What's the kinkiest eco-innovation? The most self-defeating anti-Kyoto argument? Survey our superlatives to find out, then add your own ideas in Gristmill.

new in Main Dish: It's All in the List

new in Gristmill: It's All in the List

One for the Record Books, If They Survive the Floods
U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions hit record high

This week, the feds quietly -- as in, tiptoeing in socks, holding breath -- released annual stats on U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, as required by the U.N. climate-change convention. The news is roughly as good as you would expect: The U.S., with only 5 percent of the world's population, is its biggest GHG polluter; emissions rose 1.7 percent between 2003 and 2004, the biggest increase since 2000, part of a 15.8 percent rise since 1990; in 2004, the U.S. spewed the equivalent of 6.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Not surprisingly, fossil-fuel combustion was responsible for the bulk (94 percent) of the emissions. Demand for electricity in the U.S. keeps on rising, as does the number of cars on the road. Said U.S. EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson: "[T]he U.S. is making significant progress toward the president's greenhouse-gas reduction goals." Said us: What the hell are you talking about?

straight to the source: The Independent, Steve Connor, 19 Apr 2006

straight to the source: Environment News Service, 18 Apr 2006

discuss in Gristmill: EPA releases new report on greenhouse-gas emissions

NEW IN GRIST
We're So Vain, We Think This Party's About Us
A dispatch from the launch party for Vanity Fair's green issue

In case you haven't noticed, we're pretty dang excited that our own Chip Giller made the glossy green pages of the latest issue of Vanity Fair. And Vanity Fair's pretty excited to exclaim to the world that they're turning an environmental corner. This week, they did that by hosting a swank soiree at a luxury home-goods store ... but hey. One step at a time. Emily Gertz was there, and dishes the dirt on the beautiful people.

new in Dispatches: We're So Vain, We Think This Party's About Us

see also, in Gristmill: Vanity Fair green issue

Knock, Knock. Hu's There.
Oil issue looms as Chinese prez visits White House

Buying oil from unsavory regimes, thus ensuring their grip on power. Attempting to lock up oil supplies to increase geopolitical influence. Growing heedlessly and unsustainably, polluting the air and water. These are the kinds of behaviors the world can no longer tolerate from ... China. Wait, whaaa? Seriously: During Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to the White House today, President Bush was expected to lecture him about oil. You see, the U.S. doesn't appreciate China's "mercantilist" policy of buying oil from places like Sudan, Burma, and, most significantly, Iran, with no heed for those countries' geopolitical misbehavior. The U.S. is attempting to build international support for economic sanctions against Iran over its budding nuclear program, and China could potentially stymie those plans. Bush planned to encourage Hu to get on board about Iran, quit buying oil from suspect regimes, and concentrate on energy efficiency. Hu planned to teach Bush the Chinese terms for "pot," "kettle," and "black."

straight to the source: The Globe and Mail, Barrie McKenna, 20 Apr 2006

straight to the source: The New York Times, David E. Sanger, 19 Apr 2006

Death Rides a Slightly Less Pale Horse
Climate change may not totally wipe out the human species

In what passes for good news on global warming these days, a new study has determined that climate sensitivity -- the extent to which climate will react to increased greenhouse-gas levels -- is likely within the mid-range of predictions. That means an atmospheric doubling of GHG levels, which everyone expects, will raise the global average temperature between roughly 2.5 and 8 degrees -- not the wacky 16-degree jump some had warned of. "This still commits us to quite a bit of climate change, but it leaves the door open to avoiding the largest and most devastating consequences," said lead researcher Gabriele C. Hegerl. Of course, a rise of 7 or 8 degrees in global average temperature will ensure massive storms, droughts, and sea-level rises, sufficient to hobble human society. But a 16-degree rise would be much more likely to wipe us out entirely. So, um ... we have a chance of maybe surviving! Who says the media never reports the good news?

straight to the source: The Washington Post, Rick Weiss, 20 Apr 2006

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Message to 06 CyberCats: Welcome to your web site. You will find notices from me and updates on the latest trends and controversies in journalism today. Looking forward to working with you. Clark

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Fake News. Created by Public Relations departments in businesses and government, fake news has been in the news recently and here are some new research results from the U.S.:

Dear Weekly Spin reader,

Just minutes ago, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD)
published online our groundbreaking exposé, "Fake TV News:
Widespread and Undisclosed."

This multi-media report is the culmination of an intensive, ten
month investigation by CMD senior researcher Diane Farsetta and
research consultant Daniel Price. The report provides the most
extensive account to date of how corporate-funded video news
releases (VNRs) -- fake TV news -- are routinely aired, without
disclosure, as though they were independent news reports.

Read the report here:
http://www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary

And then tell the Federal Communications Commission that fake news
must stop, by clicking here:
http://action.freepress.net/campaign/fakenews

We are presenting the report today (April 6) in Washington DC, at a
press conference with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein and the
media reform group Free Press. We've also filed a formal complaint
with the FCC, calling for the 77 stations we caught airing fake TV
news to be held accountable. All such material must be disclosed,
to honor the audience's right to know!

Learn which TV stations we caught and watch footage of the VNRs we
tracked, plus see how TV newscasts incorporated them and/or related
satellite media tour "interviews." It's all here:
http://www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Well are newspapers and information sources dieing? The answers are mixed but here is an update from the New York Times:
Are Papers About to Land or Take Off?

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
and ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

Published: March 9, 2006

The fate of Knight Ridder newspapers, the nation's second-largest newspaper chain, could be determined any day — and with it, the future of what has come to be known as the mainstream media could become clearer.

Knight Ridder was put up for sale in November under pressure from its three biggest shareholders, who said the company's stock was undervalued. In what may be an early sign that the newspaper industry's value has declined, it appears that only two bidders are likely to make offers by the deadline, which is today. Several private equity firms looked over the property but dropped out.

Offers are expected from the McClatchy Company and from the Gannett Company in partnership with the MediaNews Group. How high they bid will be significant. Low bids would suggest pessimism about the prospects for newspapers, as readers and advertisers increasingly decamp to the Internet. High bids would indicate more optimism for their future.

Knight Ridder owns 32 daily newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The San Jose Mercury News and The Kansas City Star. As late as yesterday, a consortium of buyout firms led by Thomas H. Lee Partners of New York and including the Texas Pacific Group was still interested, but industry analysts said a Lee bid was unlikely.

That leaves the bidding to two very different newspaper companies, one small, one large, both of them respected on Wall Street for their disciplined operations and high profit margins. But there is no sure sign either will offer a price that Knight Ridder will take.

Analysts said any bid over $65 a share would probably be accepted; anything less would put the company in a quandary. If Knight Ridder were unhappy with the offers, it might drop the sale and buy back more of its own stock in an attempt to revive its share price and provide its shareholders with a special dividend.

Whatever the outcome, the process portends a stringent climate for those toiling away at Knight Ridder.

"The bottom line on Knight Ridder papers is that in order to make these deals work, someone has to get extremely aggressive with costs," said Frederick W. Searby, an analyst with J. P. Morgan. "There's no question that this means that any buyer has to go in with a very, very sharp knife and trim the fat and maybe into the muscles to get this to work."

At the same time, bids that Knight Ridder considered too low could send a further message of worry through an industry already on the defensive.

"It will be very negative," Mr. Searby said. "Given the easy money out there, if these kind of prime assets can't get taken, it will rattle a lot of investors and depress sentiment."

James M. Naughton, a former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and retired president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, was less certain of the ramifications, especially if no deal were made.

"My concern is that it will be considered a referendum on the news business rather than an acknowledgment of what it really is — the failure of Knight Ridder many years ago to protect itself in the way it organized its stock," he said, referring to the company having only a single class of stock, making it more vulnerable to takeovers.

"I don't know that it speaks to the wider issue of whether there is money to be made in newspapers because the answer is yes, a lot," Mr. Naughton said. But Knight Ridder, he said, "is more apt to be under pressure from investors and therefore more apt to do bad things to its newsrooms to try to protect itself."

In any case, analysts said that a deal, if there was one, would move quickly and could be resolved in a matter of days. Paperwork on many minor aspects of a sale has already been signed by all three parties, they said. Still, no one rules out a last-minute scenario in which McClatchy joins with Gannett and MediaNews and divvies up the Knight Ridder empire, each according to its needs.

Knight Ridder is attractive largely because, despite the current environment, its newspapers remain profitable — its overall profit margin in 2004 was 19.3 percent, which is robust, albeit lower than McClatchy's and Gannett's, which own papers with margins above 30 percent.

Moreover, Knight Ridder, which has several strong newspaper Web sites and various online ventures, could serve as a gateway to a substantial presence on the Internet, from which analysts expect strong revenue in the future. Its assets include CareerBuilder.com, a popular Web site that it owns jointly with Gannett and the Tribune Company.

The downside is that its newspapers are just that — newspapers, the emblem of the old media, with big costs for printing and distribution at a time when readers and advertisers are turning to multiple other sources of news and entertainment.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

So - what's happening in journalism today. Check this story about the power of the internet to protect journalists in China:

The Great Firewall of China | A Letter's Journey in Cyberspace
The Click That Broke a Government's Grip

By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 19, 2006; Page A01

BEIJING -- The top editors of the China Youth Daily were meeting in a conference room last August when their cell phones started buzzing quietly with text messages. One after another, they discreetly read the notes. Then they traded nervous glances.

Colleagues were informing them that a senior editor in the room, Li Datong, had done something astonishing. Just before the meeting, Li had posted a blistering letter on the newspaper's computer system attacking the Communist Party's propaganda czars and a plan by the editor in chief to dock reporters' pay if their stories upset party officials.
Buy This Photo
Li Datong, shown outside the China Youth Daily, challenged a plan to dock reporters' pay if government officials took issue with their stories. The speed and power of the Internet helped launch a campaign that ultimately compelled a government retreat from the plan. (By Philip P. Pan -- The Washington Post)

No one told the editor in chief. For 90 minutes, he ran the meeting, oblivious to the political storm that was brewing. Then Li announced what he had done.

The chief editor stammered and rushed back to his office, witnesses recalled. But by then, Li's memo had leaked and was spreading across the Internet in countless e-mails and instant messages. Copies were posted on China's most popular Web forums, and within hours people across the country were sending Li messages of support.

The government's Internet censors scrambled, ordering one Web site after another to delete the letter. But two days later, in an embarrassing retreat, the party bowed to public outrage and scrapped the editor in chief's plan to muzzle his reporters.

The episode illustrated the profound impact of the Internet on political discourse in China, and the challenge that the Web poses to the Communist Party's ability to control news and shape public opinion, key elements to its hold on power. The incident also set the stage for last month's decision to suspend publication of Freezing Point, the pioneering weekly supplement that Li edited for the state-run China Youth Daily.

Eleven years after young Chinese returning from graduate study in the United States persuaded the party to offer Internet access to the public, China is home to one of the largest, fastest-growing and most active populations of Internet users in the world, according to several surveys. With more than 111 million people connected to the Web, China ranks second to the United States.

Although just a fraction of all Chinese go online -- and most who do play games, download music or gossip with friends -- widespread Internet use in the nation's largest cities and among the educated is changing the way Chinese learn about the world and weakening the Communist Party's monopoly on the media. Studies show China's Internet users spend more time online than they do with television and newspapers, and they are increasingly turning to the Web for news instead of traditional state outlets.

The government has sought to control what people read and write on the Web, employing a bureaucracy of censors and one of the world's most technologically sophisticated system of filters. But the success of those measures has been mixed. As a catalyst that amplifies voices and accelerates events, the Internet presents a formidable challenge to China's authoritarian political system. Again and again, ordinary Chinese have used it to challenge the government, force their opinions to be heard and alter political outcomes.

The influence of the Web has grown over the past two years, even as President Hu Jintao has pursued the country's most severe crackdown on the state media in more than a decade. The party said last week that Freezing Point would resume publishing, but Li and a colleague were fired, making them the latest in a series of editors at state publications to lose their jobs.

With newspapers, magazines and television stations coming under tighter control, journalists and their audiences have sought refuge online. The party's censors have followed, but cyberspace in China remains contested terrain, where the rules are uncertain and an eloquent argument can wield surprising power.

Monday, February 13, 2006

I keep telling my Academic writing classes that they have to look for reliable references and on the internet that would be the web site of established science journals,university web sites and libraries as well as government sites and large private and public international organizations-HOWEVER-WE HAVE A PROBLEM:
Reporters Find Science Journals Harder to Trust, but Not Easy to Verify

By JULIE BOSMAN

Published: February 13, 2006- In the New York Times

When the journal Science recently retracted two papers by the South Korean researcher Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, it officially confirmed what he had denied for months: Dr. Hwang had fabricated evidence that he had cloned human cells.

But the editors of Science were not alone in telling the world of Dr. Hwang's research. Newspapers, wire services and television networks had initially trumpeted the news, as they often do with information served up by the leading scientific journals.

Now news organizations say they are starting to look at the science journals a bit more skeptically.

"My antennae are definitely up since this whole thing unfolded," said Rob Stein, a science reporter for The Washington Post. "I'm reading papers a lot more closely than I had in the past, just to sort of satisfy myself that any individual piece of research is valid. But we're still in sort of the same situation that the journal editors are, which is that if someone wants to completely fabricate data, it's hard to figure that out."

But other than heightened skepticism, not a lot has changed in how newspapers treat scientific journals. Indeed, newspaper editors openly acknowledge their dependence on them. At The Los Angeles Times, at least half of the science stories that run on the front page come directly from journals, said Ashley Dunn, the paper's science editor. Gideon Gil, the health and science editor for The Boston Globe, said that two of the three science stories that run on a typical day were from research that appeared in journals.

Beyond newspapers, papers from journals are routinely picked up by newsweeklies, network news, talk radio and Web sites.

"They are the way science is conducted, they're the way people share information, they're the best approximation of acceptance by knowledgeable people," said Laura Chang, science editor for The New York Times. "We do rely on them for the starting point of many of our stories, and that will not change."

There are limits to the vetting that science reporters, who are generally not scientists themselves, can do. Most journal articles have embargoes attached, giving reporters several days to call specialists in the field, check footnotes on an article and scrutinize the results.

"Scientific discoveries are more difficult because they often require in the generalist reporter a good deal of study, follow-up interviews and some guidance on how to make sense of technical matters," said Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, which studies journalism. "But I think the scandals do require both a new level of skepticism on the part of the reporter and also maybe some new protocols between scientists and journalists."

The Hwang case was not the first time journals had been duped: recently, editors at The New England Journal of Medicine said they suspected two cancer papers they published contained fabricated data. In December, the same journal said that the authors of a 2000 study on the painkiller Vioxx had omitted the fact that several patients had had heart attacks while taking the drug in a trial. A study on the painkiller Celebrex that appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association was discredited when it was discovered that the authors had submitted only six months of data, instead of the 12 months of data they had collected.

While the journals have a peer review process that is in part meant to filter out fallacious papers by checking research techniques and conclusions, perhaps the greatest difficulty for science reporters is trying to catch what journal editors have missed.

After hearing the news of Dr. Hwang's fabrications, Mr. Gil of The Globe said he immediately remembered his newspaper's coverage of the stem cell papers.

"We were blown away, in part because we had written those stories on Page 1," Mr. Gil said. "And when we wrote them, we called the leading experts in the world on all this embryonic stem cell stuff, who are here in Boston. And they were as hoodwinked as anybody else."

Despite the fraud cases, most of what the journals publish is basically credible, said David Perlman, the science editor of The San Francisco Chronicle. Among the most prestigious science journals that reporters consult regularly are Nature, Science, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Journal of the American Medical Association.

"I think they and we have been burned enough that they're making efforts," Mr. Perlman said. "They're being more careful now, and I think reporters are too. I definitely have more of a 'Hey, let's look more carefully' attitude now that I did 5 or 10 years ago."
Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science, said in a statement in December that the journal itself was not an investigative body. But when reporting on journal findings, most news outlets fail to caution that studies must be replicated to be truly authenticated.

"Beyond Hwang, the more fundamental issue is that journals do not and cannot guarantee the truth of what they publish," said Nicholas Wade, a science reporter for The New York Times. "Publication of a paper only means that, in the view of the referees who green-light it, it is interesting and not obviously false. In other words, all of the results in these journals are tentative."

The journals' own peer review processes, which are intended to be the first barrier against fraud, have come under criticism lately. A cover story in the February issue of The Scientist said that the top-tier journals were receiving more submissions every year, overtaxing peer reviewers and weakening the screening process.

After the Hwang scandal, Science announced it was considering a set of changes to better prevent fraud: Dr. Kennedy said in January that new rules could include "requiring all authors to detail their specific contributions to the research submitted, and to sign statements of concurrence with the conclusions of the work," as well as "implementing improved methods of detecting image alteration, although it appears improbable that they would have detected problems in this particular case." (Through a spokeswoman, Dr. Kennedy declined to be interviewed and said the editors were currently conducting a review of the episode.)

Some newspapers have adopted guidelines of their own to check for conflicts of interest involving authors of journal articles. The Globe instituted guidelines last July requiring reporters to ask researchers about their financial ties to studies, and to include that information in resulting articles. In its weekly health and science section, The Globe outlines any shortcomings of a study under the heading "Cautions."

Kit Frieden, the health and science editor for The Associated Press, said: "We've always had our own peer review process, where on the major studies we seek outside expert comment. We've always regarded scientific research cautiously because mistakes can be made, and I don't think that's changed."

The growing competition for the most important research among the journals may contribute to mistakes and fabrications, even in the most prestigious of the bunch. But in the end, the severe consequences of presenting fraudulent research generally act as a deterrent, said Mr. Dunn of The Los Angeles Times.

"Unlike financial fraud, where you can bamboozle somebody of their money and disappear and then start over again, in science the researchers are in one place," he said. "If they get caught in this type of thing, their careers are over."

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

I read Google News everyday and like it second only to BBC. However here is an interesting take from Technology Review blog by Brad King
Emerging Technology and Culture
The dotcom boom didn't fail. It transformed our society from analog to digital, all in less than ten years. Now, we're on to what's next...

Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Google News Facing Down Newspapers
Posted at 12:00 AM

Search engines, RSS feeds, and other tools for navigating the Web are facing serious legal scrutiny; right now, a lawsuit brought by Agence France Presse against Google News is proceeding through the U.S. federal court system. And now a second international organization is throwing its weight behind the case, threatening to find new ways to challenge the search giant's wildly successful Google News aggregation service, according to this Reuters story.

However, the World Association of Newspapers -- the group looking into how the newspaper industry can curtail business models built on aggregation services -- says it's not interested in simply facing off in court. The group wants to find a way to financially benefit from emerging Web tools.

"It's not intended to shoot one over the bow, it's to take a group of people to look at the issue, and look at what options are open to our members," Rahnema added.

If that statement actually turns out to be true -- that the organization isn't looking for simply a legal remedy -- it would be in stark contrast to the movie and music industries, which each took hard-line stances against all forms of new electronic distribution.

A side note: it's ironic that I came across this article on a site that posts headlines of stories -- which link back to the original publisher's site.

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Yes it's a changing world:
Citizen journalism slow to catch fire
Commentary: Is old media relevant? Plus, Google multiples
By Bambi Francisco, MarketWatch

Veteran news executives are probably feeling a bit like GM these days -- ancient, behind-the-times, cost-burdened and pressured to remain relevant in the era of the Internet, a medium that attracts at least 70 million people a day logging on for email, news and other content and activities.

Yahoo News is No. 1, with 24.6 million unique visitors in December, up 15% from a year ago, followed by AOL at No. 4, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Google News stands at No.13 with 7.8 million unique visitors, up 22% from a year ago. Internet Broadcasting, which produces 70 television and news Web sites, shot up 29% in December, and ranks No. 5.

What mainstream news media fear is that while these Internet news hubs are attracting large audiences and advertising dollars, they're not spending the same type of money (if they're spending at all) on journalists, talent, producers, managers, editors, etc.

Google, which launched the beta version of its news service in the fall of 2002, has effectively automated many of the jobs of an editor. Yahoo's been aggregating content as well, though unlike Google, it's paid for the content in order to keep the audience on its site and sells advertising to cover the costs.

Want more, spend more

Still, it does seem clear that both Yahoo and Google want more than search-advertising dollars.

They're positioning themselves for a world where people spend as much time reading and watching news (and TV shows) on the Web as they do searching online.

Translation: Fees or branded advertising are becoming increasingly important.

When Google -- which relies virtually 100% on search dollars -- reports results after the close Tuesday, it will be interesting to hear what the company says about its plans to attract branded advertising dollars and how its relationship with Time Warner's AOL might help.

Google and Yahoo are approaching news content and video content with very different strategies. But both hope to tap into the pool of talent across the Internet in hopes a low-cost star might be born.

Google is trying to do so by enabling people to post their videos on its Google Video Store. Yahoo is doing so by incorporating blogs in its news searches and cultivating its own star. One example is Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, who attracted 736,000 unique visitors in December. As Yahoo puts it, Kevin's product is "news reporting in the new millennium -- a nexus of backpack journalism, narrative story-telling techniques, and the Internet, designed to reach a global audience hungry for information."

The question is how does Yahoo build up talent on a shoestring?

In other words, when does Yahoo sacrifice some margin to get serious about being a new media company?

The people's news

Or, how does one rely on the audience to stay engaged in either watching and or participating in creating content? A site for the people by the people sounds great in theory. But it seems that individuals drawn to such "by-the-people" reporting aren't necessarily good in supporting roles or teamwork.

Consider Dan Gillmor, a writer at the San Jose Mercury News who left that job to start a grassroots news organization written by citizen journalists. He recently wrote about how his efforts failed. He said that "fewer citizens participated, they were less interested in collaboration with one another, and the response to our initiatives was underwhelming."

He's just one example of course.

Yet even the larger, populist news sites such as Pajamasmedia.com, Backfence.com, and Buzzmachine.com, aren't getting much traction. Backfence.com says it's local news written by you and your neighbors while Pajamasmedia is news written by anyone any time -- especially when they're in their pajamas. They received fewer than 360,000 unique visitors each in December, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

The other question is advertising. How do user-generated or citizen journalist sites attract advertisers, especially if trust and credibility may be lacking in many of these sites?

Al Gore's Current, which is a television show that's predicted to have 50% of its content produced by viewers in the future, has some advertisers unnerved because the audience-generated content lacks credibility.

I'm sure it's still early for such democratic, bottoms-up endeavors. And, I don't doubt that in five years or a decade newspapers and TV news will be redefined and will have incorporated such audience participation features.

As Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at the Institute for the Future, once said: "In a In a two-year period, less happens than we would have thought and in a 10-year period, more happens than we could ever imagined."

So, for now, traditional media isn't dead. But it definitely is becoming less relevant.

Programming note

On Tuesday, I'll be interviewing Neil Budde, general manager of Yahoo News, who was the founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online edition, which is published by Dow Jones, the same publisher of this column.

What to do about Google stock?

Ultimately, what you pay for Google -- which reports after the close Tuesday -- depends on the multiple you're willing to pay and the return you think you might earn.

At the current price of $430, the market is likely expecting Google to earn $10 in 2006 and $13 a share in 2007. So, if by the end of 2006, a buyer is still willing to pay you 40 times the following year's projected earnings, then you'll be able to sell your Google stock to them for $520 a share. That's a 21% upside from $430.

If Google reports fourth-quarter sequential sales growth of 35%, then investors might believe Google can hit earnings of $14 or $15 a share in 2007. Applying a 40 multiple to $15 would mean Google could hit $600 by the end of this year. That's a 40% upside from $430.

If that's enough of a return for you, then it might be worth buying.

But if Google doesn't grow sales by 30% quarter-over-quarter, and margins deteriorate, then multiples might contract, meaning you won't find a buyer paying 40 times Google's '07 earnings next year, let alone 50 times, as some analysts have suggested. Moreover, it will be less likely that Google earns $13 a share in 2007, the high end of analysts' current expectations.

Currently, on average, analysts expect Google to earn somewhere between $10 and $10.50 in 2007.

If you pay a 40 times multiple for $10.50 a share in 2007, then Google's shares would be worth around $420 in a year, which is essentially zero return for the next 10 months or so.

But if Google were to report $10 a share in 2007, that would essentially indicates that Google's growth is slowing down. In that case, it's very unlikely that anyone would pay a multiple of 40. They might not even pay 35, or $350 a share.

That means if you buy it today at $430, you're looking at a downside of 19%.

But these are all optimistic assumptions. Google is expected to earn $6.06 a share for all of 2005, up from $2.64 in 2004. Let's say Google grows its earnings by a still rapid clip to "just" $9 a share by the end of 2007. Even at that rate, multiples would contract. That means Google might plunge to $315 a share, or a 27% drop.

Sound-off: Should news be written by the people?

Friday, January 27, 2006

The way the news is selected and presented continues to change:
Newspaper lets readers pick front-page stories

Lots of sites let readers pick their favorite stories, but The Wisconsin State Journal is taking advantage of that online tool to help its print edition.

Readers vote online for their favorite story each day, and the day's top vote-getter will appear on the front page of the next day's newspaper, with a "reader's choice" label. What a great idea.
Critics may resist what they see as a popularity contest undermining traditional news judgment. But we aren't too worried that you'll be scribbling up our first draft of history with Paris Hilton's daily exploits. Our unscientific poll is just another way for you to tell us what you find to be the most important, interesting or vital information of the day.

We recognize the coming transformation in the way people get their news. It isn't only that the Internet is growing as a source for local news, particularly among younger adults. Rapidly advancing technology also lets readers personalize their news reports using a myriad of sources. And nowadays nobody needs to buy ink by the barrel to publish news and comment: You just start a blog. Letting our readers actively participate in setting the news agenda is one step into a new world built around interactivity and conversations more than traditional one-way delivery of news.

"The State Journal still has the broadest local reach of any local media, and it remains a great vehicle for delivering news," editor Ellen Foley said. "But we're enhancing our online news, too, to appeal to a new generation of readers."

Another newspaper that's been using Web traffic to influence it's print edition is the Las Ultimas Noticias (LUN) - The Latest News - Chile's most widely read newspaper. For the past three years, it has been making decisions on what stories to focus on and promote in the newspaper based on how much traffic its Web site get

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Some of you may be interested in this - it looks good:

'Journalistas: 100 Years of the Best Writing and Reporting by
Women Journalists,' edited by Eleanor Mills with Kira
Cochrane
Review by JILL ABRAMSON

"Journalistas" is an anthology that bills itself as the best
writing by women journalists over the past 100 years. I first
picked up the volume with annoyance - I hated the title and
still do. And I'm not a fan of anthologies. Reading them is
often like feasting on a meal of hors d'oeuvres. Such
collections tend to dilute the narrative drive that makes
much journalism compelling in the first place. And the idea
of isolating "the best writing" from women journalists seemed
dutiful. I have never been fully persuaded that women do
really speak and write in an entirely different voice from
men, so the idea of segregating them in a book did not thrill
me.

But most of the pieces collected by Eleanor Mills (an editor
at The Sunday Times of London) and Kira Cochrane (a novelist
and former journalist) are so marvelous that I quickly cast
aside my doubts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/books/review/08abramson.html?8bu&emc=bu

Friday, January 06, 2006

Adding some perspective the the item below:
CHINA CLOSING MORE THAN 5,000 COAL MINES
China, where about 5,000 miners are killed annually, will close
thousands of coal mines in a safety crackdown, the government said on
Thursday.
FULL STORY:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/01/05/china-mine060105.html

OK. Here is were you can make a new story. How many truck drivers die each year or scientists, secreteries,coal miners, soldiers, teachers, and so on, and compare that to this:
47 JOURNALISTS KILLED IN 2005
Last year was a deadly year for journalists, especially those who
challenged authority.
FULL STORY:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/01/03/cpj060103.html
Hope you all had a good Xmas and New Year Holiday and will see you next week. Clark

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

The survey below is of interest to journalists all over th world and you can give it a try as well. Go for it. Clark
Dear Weekly Spin subscriber,

Last year the Center for Media and Democracy issued our first annual
"Falsies Awards" to recognize the people and players responsible for
polluting the modern information environment.

For this year's Falsies Awards, we want you to help us select the
winners. We have posted a survey on our website, asking people to
rank this year's award nominees. We also provide space where you can
nominate additional names. Please take a few minutes to read the
survey and help identify he worst spinners and propagandists of 2005.
You can find the survey online at the following URL:

http://www.prwatch.org/survey/public/survey.php?name=falsies2005_copy

Thanks for your input, and stay tuned to www.prwatch.org for the
announcement later this month of this year's "Falsies Awards"
winners!

Sheldon Rampton
Research director, Center for Media and Democracy

Have a second survey on the web for you to do. It is similar to the first one but is different and would appriciate you doing it all again. Thanks Clark
STEP 1: Put your student card in the card reader attached to your computer.

STEP 2: Log in.

STEP 3: Double click on the icon for Internet Explorer. [It's conveniently located on the desktop.]

STEP 4: Type in the following web address in the address (or URL) field of Internet Explorer: http://tinyurl.com/9s2y5
[This URL is different from the one used in the first survey.]

STEP 5: Students answer the questions by selecting the appropriate menu item or point on the rating scales. There is very little that needs to be typed in this time so the time necessary for completion will be shorter.

STEP 6: Click on the 'NEXT' button to complete the survey.
PS You can do it in class time this Thur. if you'd like. CAR

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Here's what news is about and what powerful people would like to stop. Some new vocabulary for you too. Clark
From The Weekley spin:
. THAT OLD CANARD LIBERAL BIAS
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6286824.html?display=Feature&referral=SUPP
"We were biased, all right - in favor of uncovering the news that
powerful people wanted to keep hidden," veteran journalist Bill
Moyers told Broadcasting & Cable. In an interview with the trade
publication, Moyers responds to accusations by the now chastened
Kenneth Tomlinson, the controversial former head of the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting who has close ties to the White House, that
he is the "exemplar of liberal PBS bias." Moyers added, "If
reporting on what's happening to ordinary people thrown overboard by
circumstances beyond their control and betrayed by Washington
officials is liberalism, I stand convicted. It is an old canard of
right-wing ideologues like Tomlinson to equate tough journalism with
liberalism. They hope to distract people from the message by trying
to discredit the messenger."
SOURCE: Broadcasting & Cable, November 28, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4231

How do you like this for a turn around?
| Bloggers create Press Plagiarist Of The Year Award |
| from the steal-this-website dept. |
| posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday December 03, @12:57 (The Media) |
| http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/03/1438224 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

[0]mccalli writes "[1]The BBC is reporting that certain bloggers, fed up
of seeing their work just lifted by the mainstream press, have created
[2]The Press Plagiarist Of The Year award. Examples are given of national
newspapers simply cutting and pasting entire articles from web sites and
passing them off as their own."

Discuss this story at:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/12/03/1438224

Links:
0. http://www.eruvia.org/
1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4484718.stm
2. http://5thnovember.blogspot.com/2005/11/press-plagiarist-of-year-award.html

Friday, December 02, 2005

A good article from the Village Voice, which is the alternate weekly paper from New York City, that I'd like you to read even though it is a bit long.

Press Clips
If Old Journalism Dies . . .
Where will new media get the news?
by Sydney H. Schanberg
November 29th, 2005 11:28 AM

Trailer trash: an Iraqi "mobile lab" that wasn't
photo: DOD photo
Chattering oracles are telling us that newspapers will die soon, as the Internet takes over. That may well be—and the Internet does carry wondrous potential for improving life (as well as voluminous drivel that used to be written on the walls of public toilets). But the puzzlement is, where will the new digital providers of information get their fresh news?

It is fresh news—daily, or at least weekly, news—that keeps citizens feeling connected to the decisions and events that alter their lives. And it is newspapers, and a handful of probing magazines, that provide most of the in-depth journalism that uncovers and analyzes those fast-moving decisions and events. Blogsters, please don't jump out of your pajamas—lots of you are doing valuable and admirable work keeping mainstream journalism on its toes. But serious journalism is labor-intensive and time-consuming and therefore requires large amounts of money and health benefits and pensions. The blogosphere has plenty of time, but as yet none of the other items.

So if and when newspapers fade into darkness, as the all-seeing oracles foretell, what will happen? Perhaps, in a future time of airborne pigs, altruism will suddenly infuse our culture, and money will descend, like manna, on the Internet to pay for the reporters to do the intensive journalism needed as a check on abusive power. And if altruism or labor-friendly corporate ideologies don't magically appear? The oracles are mostly silent on that eventuality. Maybe they think samizdat is the answer. Maybe many of them don't care.

I don't have any oracular solutions. My guess is that while serious reporting may not be delivered as often on paper made from trees, it will nonetheless live long and contribute to democracy in other delivery forms. This is so because it will always be propelled by abuses of power—and abuses of power are everlasting. It being the Thanksgiving season, I thought I would offer up, in thanks, some of the superior journalism I came across over the past few weeks.

Los Angeles Times, November 20: an impressive 6,400-word piece on an Iraqi informant code-named "Curveball." His unreliable statements to German intelligence officials about Iraq's germ warfare weapons were not only used but exaggerated by the Bush administration to justify invading Iraq in 2003. Curveball has been examined in earlier news reports, but the striking L.A. Times piece—by Bob Drogin and John Goetz—is more detailed and breaks new ground. The German authorities, who are still holding Curveball, said they told their American counterparts that the man was mentally unstable and his information mostly secondhand, but that the CIA ignored their multiple warnings and dismissed certain proofs that he had lied. The agency didn't admit error until May 2004, a year after the invasion. Both Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell used Curveball's phony statements about "mobile biological weapons labs" prominently in major war-drum speeches before the war. The Times article quotes one of the German officials saying of those speeches: "We were shocked. Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven. . . . It was not hard intelligence." I recommend reading the story start to finish.

The New York Times and The Washington Post, November 6: Both the Times' Douglas Jehl and the Post's Walter Pincus write stories about a different Iraqi informant, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, based on a Defense Intelligence Agency document recently declassified at the request of Michigan Democratic senator Carl Levin. Jehl's lead paragraph: "A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons."
Gotham Uncovered

National Journal, November 22: Murray Waas reports that 10 days after the 9-11 attacks, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter." Waas reveals that Bush received the information on September 21, 2001, at his regular morning national security briefing of 30 to 45 minutes by the CIA, which also provided the president with a printed summary of the briefing points. The specific briefing, Waas writes, "was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

Rolling Stone, November 17: James Bamford, a highly regarded author who has spilled open the inner workings of the American intelligence community, writes a compelling saga about John Rendon, whose firm, the Rendon Group, "has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help 'create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power.' Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name—the Iraqi National Congress—and served as their media guru and senior adviser." Bamford says Rendon helped put Ahmad Chalabi at the helm of the INC. In the run-up to the Iraq war, Chalabi delivered to the Bush administration a series of Iraqi informants who claimed to have intelligence about Hussein's supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction—the purported threat that was the White House's major rationale for going to war. Bamford describes how this byzantine operation wove its way to Judith Miller of The New York Times and to an Australian Broadcasting Corporation correspondent.

The Nation, November 21: William Greider gives us a deep, insightful essay about the state of American journalism that goes beyond anything I've seen in recent times. It's titled "All the King's Media." I'll say no more; just read it.

On a concluding—and lighter—note, the White House, gripped in the fog of insanity that accompanies the crumbling of a failed regime, insisted that its spokesman Scott McClellan did not speak the words he spoke at an October 31 press briefing. David Gregory of NBC News had said to McClellan, in laying the basis for a question about the Plamegate scandal, that "we know that" both Karl Rove and the indicted I. Lewis Libby had conversations with reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame.

McClellan replied: "That's accurate." Transcripts from Congressional Quarterly and Federal News Service show it that way. So does the video. The White House is standing by its deranged rewrite, quoting McClellan as having said: "I don't think that's accurate." See Joe Strupp's November 9 story on the Editor & Publisher website (editorandpublisher.com). Also see the video, which is linked in the story.

It all depends on what you mean by the word truth.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Here is an example of fictional news that I was talking about yesterday in class:

U.S. Is Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers
By JEFF GERTH and SCOTT SHANE
A covert campaign is under way to plant paid propaganda in
the Iraqi news media and pay Iraqi journalists monthly
stipends.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/politics/01propaganda.html?th&emc=th

Hello everyone here are the survey instructions that I would like you to take. Please try doing it in the next couple of days.
STEP 1: Put your student card in the card reader attached to your computer.

STEP 2: Log in.

STEP 3: Double click on the icon for Internet Explorer. [It's conveniently located on the desktop.]
STEP 4: Type in the following web address in the address (or URL) field of Internet Explorer: http://tinyurl.com/d9wkf

STEP 5: Answer questions 1-3 by making choices from among the items in the pop-up menus. For questions 4-10, the answers will need to by typed into the text boxes.
STEP 6: Click on the 'NEXT' button to complete the survey.

STEP 7: Congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Monday, November 28, 2005

Japanese held over fake news site

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Police have arrested a former computer programmer for allegedly publishing a fabricated news article on a fake Yahoo Japan news Web site saying that China had invaded the Japanese island of Okinawa.

Tokyo Metropolitan Police department arrested Takahiro Yamamoto, 30, Monday on suspicion of violating patent laws, a police spokesman said on condition of anonymity, citing departmental policy.

He said Yamamoto allegedly accredited the fake article to Kyodo News Agency and published it on an Internet site that he had designed to look like Yahoo! Japan Corp's news site.

The story was written in Japanese with a dateline "America, Oct. 18 Kyodo" followed by a headline saying "Chinese Military invades Okinawa," the police said.

Police had confiscated Yamamoto's personal computer and analyzed the data stored in it.

Kyodo said it and Yahoo had filed complaints to police in October.

The Web site was accessed 66,000 times until it was taken down on October 19, Kyodo said, quoting police.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo is one of the world's largest Internet portal operators, with some 345 million people using its mix of search engines, news sites and online shopping.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

[Japan Times EDITORIAL]
Thanks for a thankless job
Most of the time, let's face it, journalists just do not get good press. The very word "reporter" is often used

or interpreted as a smear. Newspaper readers and television viewers alike regularly complain to news

organizations about their employees' bias, incompetence and bad grammar. And for all their rhetoric about press

freedom, the powerful too often treat journalists as, at best, a kind of malodorous underclass -- vaguely

necessary people whom they prefer to see as little of as possible. At worst, they treat them like criminals or

subversives, as the world was reminded again last Tuesday when the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)

handed out this year's International Press Freedom Awards in New York.
[MORE] ->
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?ed20051127a1.htm

Monday, November 21, 2005

Controversy and Conflict: here is how it looks in America these days.
Journalist, Cover Thyself
Illustration by The New York Times

Tireless media critic Howard Kurtz writes for The Washington Post and broadcasts on CNN, raising conflict questions.

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By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: November 21, 2005

Here's something you do not see every day: a newspaper reporter interrogating his own boss - on live television yet.

Howard Kurtz, the media writer for The Washington Post, posed tough questions yesterday for nearly eight minutes to Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's executive editor, on a program where Mr. Kurtz is host, CNN's "Reliable Sources." The subject was the revelation last week that Bob Woodward, The Post's investigative reporter, had not disclosed the fact that a senior official in the Bush administration leaked the name of a C.I.A. operative to him more than two years ago.
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Howard Kurtz, left, a Washington Post reporter, questioning his own executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., over the controversy at his paper.

Mr. Kurtz's program then featured a discussion with three panelists, one of whom assailed Mr. Woodward. (Mr. Kurtz had invited him to be on the program, but Mr. Woodward booked himself instead on CNN's "Larry King Live.")

You've heard of reality television? This might be reality newspaper. It is "The Washington Post Live," and it is playing out on CNN, thanks in part to Mr. Kurtz and his highly unusual double role as media writer for The Post and media referee for the cable network.

In the last few years, with the rise of blogs and a rich supply of scandals at news organizations, including The New York Times, the media have come under intense scrutiny. And many news outlets have turned a critical eye on themselves - a tricky matter rife with conflict that raises the question of whether anyone can report fully and fairly on his or her own employer, particularly for public consumption.

Few have lived in the cross-hairs of these conflicts more visibly than Mr. Kurtz, who has owned the media beat at The Post since 1990 and been host of "Reliable Sources" since 1998.

He draws salaries from two of the most important media companies in the country: CNN, which is owned by Time Warner, and The Post, which is owned by The Washington Post Company. Such arrangements do not violate Post policy. In fact, The Post has quite liberal rules regarding extracurricular work by its reporters and editors.

As Mr. Downie put it in an online chat last week on the newspaper's Web site, "We think there is value in having our best journalism reach as many people as possible through our newspaper, this Web site, television and radio appearances and books."

He may never have imagined that one person might do all those jobs at once. But Mr. Kurtz, 52, does - redefining the term cottage industry and raising questions about potential conflicts of interest.

"It's very odd to look at," said Jack Shafer, media critic for Slate.com. "This is the duck-billed platypus of journalism, an egg-laying mammal with fur - it's just something very bizarre."

Mr. Downie said in an interview that he was comfortable with Mr. Kurtz's dual roles because they were disclosed in a tag line in The Post and on the screen on CNN.

David Bohrman, vice president of CNN and Washington bureau chief, said that Mr. Kurtz was "as tough as anybody" on the network, adding that his dual roles at The Post and CNN served as a useful "check and balance," because if he were "throttled or stifled at one place, he has another platform to get it out."

Mickey Kaus, who is a blogger on Slate.com and a frequent critic of Mr. Kurtz, says that he has been an honest reporter and is equally tough on The Post and CNN, but that his dual positions create an inherent institutional conflict that exists regardless of how fair he may be and how much he discloses his various roles.

"The conflict is that he works for one of the giant corporations that he covers - CNN - and that corporation has made his career," Mr. Kaus said. If he makes CNN mad, he said, it could hurt that career. "Len Downie is in denial about it," Mr. Kaus added.

Mr. Kurtz brushes off charges of conflict of interest and says the proof of his independence is evident in his work.

"The biggest conflict I face," he said, "is writing about The Washington Post, which I do periodically and, I think, rather aggressively. I don't think you can find a media writer in the country who has taken on his own organization as many times and on as many difficult issues as I have. And when I write about CNN, which I have also not hesitated to criticize, we disclose that at the paper."

Monday, November 14, 2005

Where the action is - where the money is -:

By ELIZABETH JENSEN
Published: November 14, 2005

Journalism students at Ohio State University expected to get a real-world lesson in competition this school year, courtesy of two media entrepreneurs who see national business potential in taking on student-run campus newspapers. But with the rollout of the new paper called U Weekly, they are getting a lesson in campus politics as well.

When classes resumed in Columbus, Ohio, on Sept. 21, the university's 124-year-old student daily, The Lantern, had a professional rival in U Weekly, a 20,000-circulation, full-color tabloid laden with entertainment articles. The Lantern, a mostly black-and-white small broadsheet offers a more usual mixture of campus and national news stories.

For Wayne T. Lewis, 34, chief executive of the privately owned University Media Group, and his partner, Clark Gaines, U Weekly is their biggest bet so far that there is an underserved niche market on college campuses, with enough beer, bar and bookstore advertising to support a rollout near other public colleges next fall.

But what had seemed to be an amicable relationship with Ohio State went sour days before the start-up of U Weekly, Mr. Lewis said in an interview. By his account, the university reneged on an agreement to allow him to distribute the paper at 150 indoor locations on campus, reducing the number of racks to 63.

Ray Catalino, the manager since 1989 of The Lantern, minimized the matter. "I don't think there was any cutback from the university," he said.

Mr. Lewis responded to the reduced distribution with what he called "garish black boxes" at 25 outside locations, on public property, and hired students to give out the paper.

"We're getting into students' hands, but it's costing more," he said. The two sides continue to talk, he said, adding that he expected an amicable resolution soon.

Despite the chilly welcome, Mr. Lewis and Mr. Gaines, who is 29, said they saw national potential in marketing to 18-to-26-year-olds, as distinct from the wider 18-to-34-year-old group that alternative weeklies commonly seek.

"Major media companies are screaming to get young readers," Mr. Lewis said, but 18-year-olds and 30-year-olds often have markedly different interests. "We feel that the young audience wants that young content."

The two of them are scouting other public universities for an expansion next fall, provided they can raise enough capital. For that, they are being advised by a consultant, Henry K. Wurzer, a former Hearst and Tribune Company executive.

"In my career, I've read countless business plans," Mr. Wurzer said, "and this is one of the most dynamic yet realistic plans that I've read."

The Lantern, written and edited by students with a weekday circulation of 28,000 (Ohio State has 51,000 students), is supported with advertising and has been profitable in 6 of the last 10 years, Mr. Catalino said. It is an important part of the university communications department curriculum, with students required to write for it, without pay, for one quarter. Student editors at The Lantern are paid and autonomous, and free to reject the class work for publication.

This required course work, though, has raised the question of whether students in the Lantern news-writing class can work for U Weekly. Sonya Humes, a communications department faculty member who advises The Lantern, cited existing conflict-of-interest guidelines that effectively prohibit such overlap. Nonetheless, she said in an interview, the university is trying to devise alternatives for students who choose to remain on U Weekly's staff.

In an e-mail message to students, Ms. Humes called U Weekly "a very aggressive push by an outside corporation." She maintained that her only goal was to protect "student editorial control" at The Lantern while adding, "Competition in journalism is good because it raises the bar and gets folks thinking about how to differentiate publications from others."

Columbus is a far more competitive market than Mr. Lewis faced in 1997 when he founded Tiger Weekly at his alma mater, Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. There, his now-established 17,000-circulation paper is the only alternative weekly. In 2004, he and Mr. Gaines started Wildcat Weekly at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Columbus already had two alternative weeklies providing lively arts and music coverage to both students and older readers. The Other Paper prints 53,000 copies, while the money-losing 45,000-circulation Columbus Alive is being acquired by the city's daily newspaper, The Columbus Dispatch.

"There's only so much money here and the market is pretty tight," Mr. Catalino of The Lantern said.

Mr. Lewis said U Weekly's return rate was a low 6 percent, and it had found enough advertisers to support a 40-page paper, including national beer brands, bars and video stores.

One is the Frog Bear and Wild Boar bar. "The layout is very nice," said Randy Haffey, the bar's marketing director, "and there's not a porn section in the back."

The bar also advertises in The Lantern, but Mr. Haffey said the college paper "has not changed, it has not updated itself, it hasn't done anything new in the last couple years," adding "it's very expensive," with a full-page ad running not quite double the cost of one in U Weekly.

Mr. Catalino replied that for his advertisers, The Lantern was a better deal. "For what you are getting," he said, "we are not at all expensive."

Friday, November 11, 2005

Japanese culture? Yes!
[0]jonerik writes to tell us The Associated press is running an article
stating that several American newspapers are going to [1]start carrying
manga with their normal arsenal of comics. The papers feel that this will
help boost their readership amongst a younger audience. The two strips
that made the cut are [2]Van Von Hunter, and [3]Peach Fuzz which are both
created by American writer/illustrators and are being distributed by
[4]Universal Press Syndicate.

Discuss this story at:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/11/09/2136225

Links:
0. mailto:jonerik@@gis.net
1. http://abcnews.go.com/International/print?id=1289576
2. http://www.vanvonhunter.com/
3. http://www.tokyopop.com/dbpage.php?propertycode=PCH&categorycode=BMG
4. http://www.uexpress.com/

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

This is from Technology Review published by MIT and is a good example of both a tech. story and and interview.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Cellular Life in Japan

Anthropologist Mizuko Ito studies Japan's mobile-phone culture and warns against extrapolating from Japan's tech development.

By Wade Roush

To imagine how Americans might be using mobile devices such as cell phones in the future, just look at Japanese youth. At least that's the conventional wisdom (think Wired magazine's long-running "Japanese Schoolgirl Watch" column).

But the dynamic may not be so simple. While Japan is indisputably a hothouse of innovation in mobile technology, the way Japanese consumers actually use cell phones and other mobile paraphernalia is an outcome of historical and sociological factors unique to Japan, argues anthropologist Mizuko Ito, one of the world's foremost authorities on the comparative anthropology and sociology of mobile device usage. "I don't think it's appropriate to say any [one country] is defining technology evolution," Ito says.

A research scientist in the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Ito has a joint appointment at Keio University in Tokyo. She's also the lead editor of Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, a collection of scholarly essays recently released by MIT Press.

Technologyreview.com's Executive Web Editor, Wade Roush, interviewed Ito on November 8.

Technology Review: How long have you been studying the way people in Japan use mobile phones, and what got you interested?

Mizuko Ito: I first got interested in it about six years ago now. I went to do some post-doctoral work in the late '90s, and my research topic was how young people were using new media. For the boys, I was sort of gravitating toward gaming studies, but what was so interesting at the time was that the mobile phone was just coming into its heyday in Japan, and it was a technology use being driven by young girls. It's fairly unusual that teenage girls are seen as technology innovators, so it was a really attractive case for me for a lot of reasons. The gender aspects were interesting, and it was a different type of technology from gaming.

TR: You have dual academic appointments at USC and in Japan, at Keio University. You seem to be in a opportune position to do cross-cultural analyses of mobile technologies. How do you split your time?

MI: I first started my appointment at Keio when I was first living in Japan. I moved back to the U.S. a little over three years ago, to the research center here at USC. Now mostly I spend my time at USC during the academic years and my summers in Japan. The reason it works is I have some really good colleagues in Japan who manage the research, and we are really close collaborators with them, so even though I've been away I'm able to stay involved.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Cellular Life in Japan

Continued from Page 1

By Wade Roush

TR: One of the messages of your new book is that the people in different countries use cell phones differently depending partly on the way the technology is rolled out, and partly on the culture of each country. Do you feel that there's a misperception out there about cell phone culture in Japan that you and your collaborators were trying to correct?

MI: In conversations about technology in Japan, the assumption is that there is something inherent in a particular technology that makes it get taken up in a particular way, and it's not inherently culturally specific. But at the same time, if there is something that seems different from how other countries have taken up a technology, it gets attributed to the cultural strangeness of the Japanese, i.e., if the Japanese don't use cell phones like people in the U.S. it must be something cultural. I'm an anthropologist and I like cultural explanations, too. But it's important to look at historical, economic, and other factors playing into it.

For example, it would be really easy to say that the reason Japanese people like text messaging over voice calling is because the Japanese are inherently more polite, or they don't want to disrupt the environment. And that's probably part of the explanation. But there's also a lot of important historical reasons why that modality of communication has become so dominant.

The early history of pager technology, for example, had a very strong effect on how text messaging rolled out to other services like the mobile phone. [So many people used pagers for text-messaging before the spread of wireless telephony that texting was one of the first features the Japanese demanded in their cell phones. -Ed.] It's a little bit too simple to say that any one of those factors is totally determining. The thing I was trying to resist is using culture as a residual category for the otherwise unexplainable.

TR: Your book includes many essays by Japanese scholars. What drives sociological research on mobile devices in Japan? Is there a sense that the way teens and adults use mobile phones is a burning social question?

MI: I think the "moral panic" has calmed down a lot since the period in the late '90s when it was really a new phenomena...That term actually comes from Folk Devils and Moral Panics, a book by Stanley Cohen that was sort of a sociological work tracking how, whenever there's a new phenomenon in youth culture, there's this period where the press takes up these issues in a particular way. The usual pattern is that the activities of a relatively extreme minority of the youth population are generalized to the behavior of youth as a whole.

That definitely happened with mobile phones in Japan. Many people would say the mobile phone had an augmenting or maybe even a determining effect on the emergence of teen girl street culture.

Then there was the issue of manners and usage in public space, and I think that issue has really gotten resolved more or less, unlike in the U.S., where people are still working out the issue of when it's appropriate to make a voice call. That's totally disappeared as the subject of moral concern, partly because it's been successfully regulated. &nbsp;The youth culture issues are inherently more complex, because there will always be a 'youth problem' that society is grappling with.

TR: Another theme in the volume is that people in Japan seem to use their mobile phones to strengthen their existing social connections within a fairly small group of intimates -- whereas in the U.S., for example, people tend to use the Internet to look outward and communicate with many more people than they usually would.

MI: I think the findings are mainly showing that most [Japanese] kids use their phones most of the time to keep in touch with a close and existing social group. There is a relatively significant minority of kids who use the phones to get outside of that network. These tend to be kids who had their social network handed down to them. It's less than 10 percent, but they're important.

If you look at the technical layer, mobile phones are definitely optimized for intimate, interpersonal communication, whereas the Internet is broader. The mobile phone is moving in that direction, but it's obviously still point-to-point communication.

I'm not really sure if this is an historically specific or culturally specific kind of trend. The fact that for most Japanese kids, their first point of access to the Internet is through the mobile phone, not the PC, is probably having a lot of subtle effects on how that networking is happening. But the concept that it's allowing kids in Japan to break new ground socially? The research on that is probably more conservative. I'm just starting up some research in that area.

TR: Is there any way in which people in the United States should feel that they are "behind" Japan when it comes to cell phone technology?

MI: I think one of the things that we were trying to argue in the book is that there isn't a single trajectory [for technology development]. If you look at Japan, South Korea, and the U.S., their technology trajectories have been completely different. That's where you get an interesting opportunity for comparative sociology.

In the U.S., obviously the PC-based Internet has been the dominant information technology. South Korea is interesting because you see the layering of technologies -- they are ahead in just about everything. But all three of these countries are outliers, in some sense. I don't think it's appropriate to say any of them are defining technology evolution. They represent three quite disparate ways in which information infrastructures have been rolled out.

Japan is interesting in that, unlike South Korea, it hasn't been the leader in broadband and network technology. The reason it's ahead in the mobile space is that it's optimized for usage in that space. It's still an advanced information ecology and yet it doesn't have the same widespread broadband access. The government isn't paying the same attention to certain forms of broadband wireless deployment.

The U.S. is an incubator for advanced PC Internet technology, and Japan is at the other end of the spectrum. The reason the Japanese are doing more diverse and cool things with their mobile phones is because they're depending on them more as their primary information devices. It will continue to be an incubator for interesting mobile technologies, but is certainly not the site were you should look for everything IT.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Where do the media get money from? Advertising which pays for the full operation of the paper and makes a profit for the owners. No money no reporters ect.
- TECHNOLOGY -

Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too
By SAUL HANSELL
This year Google will sell more advertising than any
newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/business/yourmoney/30google.html?th&emc=th

Friday, October 28, 2005

Well Junko Shinkawa and Mayu Sasakura both have sent me an audio file. Great job! All of you should give it a try. Send it to carsurf@dragon.email.ne.jp. Good Luck. Clark

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