The assignment for next Tue. noon deadline is a story about animal rights that you research and write. I also want you to read through "The Weekly Spin" below. It is a valuable source for storys that don't often get widly published but should. The question for this week which you can e-mail the answer to carsurf@dragon.email.ne.jp, for extra credit is: What is liguistic framing? That would be a good subject for an academic paper. Send me your answers by this Sunday for cridit. See you next week. Clark
From: weekly-spin@prwatch.org
Subject: The Weekly Spin, October 11, 2006
Date: October 12, 2006 11:04:23 PM JST
To: cmd+weekly_spin-46979@lists.democracyinaction.org
Reply-To: weekly-spin@prwatch.org


THE WEEKLY SPIN, October 11, 2006

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THIS WEEK'S NEWS

== BLOG POSTINGS ==
1. Zigging and Zagging on Cutting and Running
2. Remember Those Term-Limit Pledges?
3. Accuracy of Report on Video News Releases Affirmed: CMD Issues Full Rebuttal of RTNDA Claims

== SPIN OF THE DAY ==
1. Hiding 600,000 Dead Iraqis
2. Spinning Bout the Nukes in the Bay
3. U.S. Army: From 'One' To 'Strong'
4. First Soda, Now School Junk Food: Clinton Deal Claims Lower-Cal Crunch
5. CMD's 2005 Annual Report Available On Line
6. PR or School Teachers? Maldives Party Asks
7. Blowing in the Wind
8. Hill & Knowlton Challenged Over Maldives Work
9. Losing Afghanistan Twice Over
10. European Drug Pushers
11. Burson Backs Licensing PR Professionals
12. Covering Up for Foley?
13. FCC Names Obesity/Food Marketing Task Force
14. The Best Book Ever?

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

== BLOG POSTINGS ==

1. ZIGGING AND ZAGGING ON CUTTING AND RUNNING
by Sheldon Rampton

The Bush administration's use of the term "cut and run" to
caricature opponents of the war in Iraq is yet another example of
the attention that America's war party pays to rhetorical repetition
and linguistic framing at the expense of realistic discourse and
analysis. Bush himself has taken to using this catchprase
repeatedly. At a recent speech in Birmingham, Alabama, he declared
that "The party of FDR, the party of Harry Truman, has become the
party of cut-and-run." He repeated the charge a few days later, at a
political fundraising breakfast for California Congressman Richard
Pombo. "The Democrats are the party of cut and run," he said. "Ours
is a party that has got a clear vision and says we will give our
commanders and troops the support necessary to achieve that victory
in Iraq."
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5098

2. REMEMBER THOSE TERM-LIMIT PLEDGES?
by Elliott Fullmer

It's hard to believe that twelve years have passed since the Newt
Gingrich-led Republican Revolution of 1994.
In that year, GOP candidates launched a successful effort to
take control of both the House and Senate, something they had not
been able to accomplish in the previous forty-two years. Their
campaign focused heavily on the Contract with America, a list of
objectives that Republicans promised to pursue in Congress if
elected into the majority.
One of the key proposals of the document was the Citizen
Legislature Act, a measure which would amend the Constitution to
place limits on the number of terms members of both the House and
Senate could serve. The argument was that career politicians become
too distant from the people and need to be replaced by ?citizen
legislators.? In a show of support for the proposed amendment,
which eventually failed in the House, several GOP candidates pledged
to limit their own terms (independent of any legislation forcing
them to do so) if elected. Small numbers of candidates followed this
trend in future elections as well.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5275

3. ACCURACY OF REPORT ON VIDEO NEWS RELEASES AFFIRMED: CMD ISSUES FULL REBUTTAL OF RTNDA CLAIMS
by Diane Farsetta

October 9, 2006 ? The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD)
released today a full rebuttal of claims made against its April 2006
report, "Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed." The report
tracked television stations' use of video news releases (VNRs),
narrated pre-packaged segments produced by public relations firms
for their clients. The report documented 77 television stations
airing VNRs or related materials; not once did stations disclose the
client behind the segment. The report led the U.S. Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) to launch an investigation of the 77
stations named, in August 2006.
Last week, the Radio-Television News Directors Association
(RTNDA), through the law and lobby firm Wiley Rein & Fielding, urged
the FCC to drop its investigation. RTNDA alleged that the
investigation has had "a chilling effect" on TV newsrooms. RTNDA
also issued a critique of CMD?s report that misrepresented and
distorted the substance of the report. CMD's full, point-by-point
rebuttal of the RTNDA critique is available online at:
www.prwatch.org/node/5282.
For the rest of this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5283

== SPIN OF THE DAY ==

1. HIDING 600,000 DEAD IRAQIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/world/middleeast/11casualties.html
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber have a chapter in The Best War Ever
titled "Not Counting the Dead," reporting on how the US government
has chosen to hide the horrific impact of the US invasion and
occupation. Now the authors of a major study examined in the book
have a new study out. The New York Times reports, "A team of
American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that
600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003
American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war
here. ... It is the second study by researchers from the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. ... The study comes at a
sensitive time for the Iraqi government, which is under pressure
from American officials to take action against militias driving the
sectarian killings. In the last week of September, the government
barred the central morgue in Baghdad and the Health Ministry ? the
two main sources of information for civilian deaths ? from
releasing figures to the news media. Now, only the government is
allowed to release figures."
SOURCE: The New York Times, October 11, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5289

2. SPINNING BOUT THE NUKES IN THE BAY
http://www.sundayherald.com/58383
"Scotland's green watchdog played down the risks of radioactive
contamination at a popular coastal resort in Fife following an
11th-hour intervention by government spin doctors," reports Rob
Edwards. "Internal emails reveal the Scottish Environment Protection
Agency (Sepa) delayed and then altered a news release after it had
been described as 'not entirely helpful' by a senior Scottish public
relations official." The Sepa release announced a "hazard
assessment," which found that radioactive waste dumped decades ago,
after the closure of a naval air base, had resulted in 100 radiation
hotspots. The area includes "Scotland's largest sailing club and a
beach." The intervention by Scottish Executive PR official Neil
Trotter resulted in major changes to the release. The original
version estimated the likelihood of radioactive exposure to be
"around 1 in 900 a year for the whole beach, and around 1 in 90 for
the area with the greatest concentration" of waste. The published
version merely stated the "likelihood of harm ... is considered to
be low." Sepa denied that they had "tone[d] down" the release,
saying, "The content of Sepa press releases is decided by Sepa."
SOURCE: Sunday Herald (Scotland), October 8, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5287

3. U.S. ARMY: FROM 'ONE' TO 'STRONG'
http://adage.com/article?article_id=112420
"The Army spends more than $200 million annually on marketing -- the
biggest ad contract in the federal government," notes Advertising
Age. Ten months after winning the U.S. Army's main advertising
contract, the McCann Worldgroup firm announced the theme of its
first campaign: strength. "There's strong, and then there's Army
strong," explained a video from the firm. "There is nothing on this
green earth that is stronger than the U.S. Army." Like other
recruiting efforts, the Army's "strong" campaign "was developed to
specifically address not just those considering an Army career, but
family members and friends of potential recruits. Since the start of
the Iraq war, the U.S. military's advertising increasingly has
focused on convincing parents and peers that the choice of the
military career is a good one." The "strong" TV ads will start
airing November 9; print ads will run in 2007.
SOURCE: Advertising Age, October 9, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5286

4. FIRST SODA, NOW SCHOOL JUNK FOOD: CLINTON DEAL CLAIMS LOWER-CAL CRUNCH
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061006/ap_on_he_me/diet_school_snacks
"Kids will buy what they want. We just stop by the bodega on the way
home." So says one thirteen year old, unimpressed by what the adults
have just signed -- a "voluntary agreement" between five snack food
makers (Kraft, M&M Mars, Campbell Soup Co., Dannon, and PepsiCo),
the American Heart Association, and the Clinton Foundation in round
two of the former president's voluntary intiatives to discourage bad
eating habits in America's schools. The "deal" is this: where
schools agree to follow "Competitive Food Guidelines," vending
machines will stock only products that contain no more than 35
percent of their calories from fat, no more than 10 percent
saturated fat, and no more than 35 percent of sugar content by
weight. Although the guidelines have been commended, implementation
raises doubts. Janey Thornton, president of the School Nutrition
Association, said, "It has to have some enforcement behind it... .
[S]ome states have none and that's where I think the problem comes
in." The Center for Science in the Public Interest noted that local
schools and vending machine companies could completely ignore the
program. Gary Ruskin, director of Commercial Alert, criticized the
initiative as "a sham and a public relations stunt" by junk food
firms.
SOURCE: Associated Press, October 6, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5285

5. CMD'S 2005 ANNUAL REPORT AVAILABLE ON LINE
http://www.prwatch.org/pdfs/CMD_2005_Annual_Rpt.pdf
The Center for Media and Democracy's 2005 Annual Report is now
available online. Read CMD staff bios, descriptions of our projects,
a summary of media coverage we received in 2005, and our financial
statements. We appreciate the individuals and foundations that have
provided support for our work throughout the years. If you would
like to contribute to CMD, please click here to give through our
secure server.
SOURCE: CMD 2005 Annual Report
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5284

6. PR OR SCHOOL TEACHERS? MALDIVES PARTY ASKS
http://www.minivannews.com/news/news.php?id=2504
The Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) has called for the termination
of Hill & Knowlton's contract defending the repressive government of
the Maldives. The MDP calculated that the PR firm has been paid
$800,000 over almost three years. "According to World Bank figures,
$800,000 is enough money to pay for the salaries of 290 Maldivian
secondary school teachers for a whole year," acting MDP President
Ibrahim Hussain Zaki stated in a media release. In response to
recent media coverage of Hill & Knowlton's role in the Maldives, Tim
Fallon posted a note on his blog defending his work as leading to
"seismic" changes in the Islamic nation. Dozens of visitors to the
blog aren't buying his story. "Why on earth would you help a brutal
dictator who has murdered his own people? This shows what kind of a
company Hill & Knowlton really is," wrote one.
SOURCE: Minivan News (Maldives), October 7, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5281

7. BLOWING IN THE WIND
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-rocketdyne6oct06,1,5612437,full.story
A five-year long study into the 1959 meltdown of a nuclear reactor
near Simi Valley in California has concluded that it could have
caused between 260 and 1,800 cases of cancer. The report could not
be more specific because the U.S. Department of Energy and Boeing,
the parent company of Rocketdyne, refused to provide the weather
data crucial to modelling where the radioactive pollution went. The
report states that Boeing officials told the researchers that the
wind data was proprietary information. "How can you possibly declare
a trade secret which way the wind blew on a certain day?" Dan
Hirsch, the co-chairman of the advisory panel that oversaw the
study, told the Los Angeles Times. At the time of the accident, the
lab issued a media statement claiming, "No release of radioactive
materials to the plant or its environs occurred, and operating
personnel were not exposed to harmful conditions."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5280

8. HILL & KNOWLTON CHALLENGED OVER MALDIVES WORK
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article1799467.ece
In an overview of the changes occurring in the Maldives, a cluster
of islands to the southwest of India, reporter Meera Selva sketches
how the repressive president, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, is failing to
respond to the either the democracy movement or the growing
influence of Islamic fundamentalism. "The government is aware that
the problems facing ordinary Maldivians may affect its tourism
industry, but its response has been cynical rather than hopeful,"
Selva writes. Tim Fallon from Hill and Knowlton's London office has
been working for Gayoom's government, to prevent a tourism boycott
in response to controversies over police brutality and the lack of
multi-party elections. Hill & Knowlton is reportedly on a ?13,000
(US$24,000) a month retainer. Speaking on BBC Radio, Maldives
democracy activist Jenny Latheef said, "I don't know why Hill &
Knowlton would support somebody like that. He's a dictator, a brutal
dictator."
SOURCE: The Independent (UK), October 5, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5276

9. LOSING AFGHANISTAN TWICE OVER
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092506R.shtml
Some readers of Newsweek read a cover story in the October 2, 2006
issue titled "Losing Afghanistan: The Rise of Jihadistan," but not
readers in the United States. Editions destined for Asia, Latin
America, and Europe provided an in-depth analysis of the situation
in Afghanistan and the failures of the U.S.-led war such as, "The
harsh truth is that five years after the US invasion on Oct. 7,
2001, most of the good news is confined to Kabul, with its choking
rush-hour traffic jams, a construction boom and a handful of
air-conditioned shopping malls. Much of the rest of Afghanistan
appears to be failing again. Most worrisome, a new failed-state
sanctuary is emerging across thousands of square miles along the
Afghan-Pakistan border: 'Jihadistan,' it could be called." Readers
in the U.S. instead were given a retrospective of the career of
photographer Annie Leibovitz.
SOURCE: TruthOut.org, September 25, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5278

10. EUROPEAN DRUG PUSHERS
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15046930/
The drug industry is hopeful that it will succeed in watering down
the European Union's ban on direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) of
pharmaceuticals. Draft proposals from a working group, which
includes members of the European Commission and the drug industry,
have proposed a public-private partnership to provide patient
"information" on prescription medicines. It is a prospect that
horrifies the medical watchdog group Health Action International
(HAI). In response (pdf) to the latest EU push, HAI stated, "The
pharmaceutical industry is in no position to provide the information
people want, need and deserve; information that is unbiased,
reliable and comparative." In 2004 a push to weaken the EU's DTCA
ban was overwhelmingly rejected. HAI reports that one of the
European Union members of parliament defended the latest move on the
grounds that "70% of the current MEPs were new to their positions."
SOURCE: MSNBC, September 28, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5274

11. BURSON BACKS LICENSING PR PROFESSIONALS
http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/article/596797/Burson-calls-PR-industry-counter-bad-publicity/
Harold Burson, the founder of Burson-Marsteller, has flagged his
support for the licensing of PR professionals. "It would overcome
the derogatory manner in which we are depicted in the news media,"
he told a PR conference in India. The idea of licensing of PR
practitioners has a long history within the profession. PR industry
pioneer Edward Bernays supported it, while Burson previously opposed
it. In a speech in 1992, Bernays argued that without a system of
licensing, a set of guiding principles and "a strict ethical code,
PR will be relegated to an increasingly diluted status and waning
importance in our society."
SOURCE: PR Week (sub req'd), October 5, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5273

12. COVERING UP FOR FOLEY?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/washington/05hastert.html
Republicans in the U.S. Congress continue to grapple with the
controversy surrounding the resignation in disgrace of Rep. Mark
Foley. Former Foley chief of staff Kirk Fordham, who subsequently
became chief of staff to Rep. Tom Reynolds (chair of the National
Republican Congressional Committee), has resigned following reports
that he tried to stop ABC News from reporting on the sexually
explicit chats that Foley had with teenagers about the Grand Old
Party in his pants. But Fordham seems unwilling to play the role of
fall guy in the cover-up scandal. In a news conference he told
reporters that he had been warning people about Foley since 2003 or
earlier, holding "more than one conversation with senior staff at
the highest levels of the House of Representatives, asking them to
intervene when I was informed of Mr. Foley?s inappropriate
behavior." As the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz observes, "That's
what's driving this whole thing, the sense that key Republicans were
more concerned with the politics of the Foley mess than protecting
the teenagers he was hitting up online."
SOURCE: New York Times, October 5, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5270

13. FCC NAMES OBESITY/FOOD MARKETING TASK FORCE
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060928/ap_on_he_me/food_ads_kids;_ylt=AhJ8mx7X
Citing "a public health problem that will only get worse unless we
take action," Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin
Martin announced a joint task force on child obesity. The task force
currently brings together mostly corporate and conservative members,
including Walt Disney, media watchdog Parents Television Council
(which recently lauded General Mills for "family friendly
advertising" and specializes in indecency complaints to the FCC),
and the Beverly LaHaye Institute, which opposes sex trafficking,
promotes abstinence and attacks feminists. Sesame Workshop and
Children Now reportedly have also been invited to participate.
Children Now's board chair is marketing consultant and former ad
exec Jane Gardner. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who urged Martin to
create the task force, said that he did not consult with any other
members of Congress. In the press conference announcing the task
force, Sen. Brownback appeared to propose his own conclusion to the
task force's work: further voluntary restrictions, rather than FCC
regulations on media marketing to children. "If we start down the
road of saying we're going to limit everything and we're going to do
it with a regulatory regime, I think you get everybody in a quick
adversarial relationship." The Institute of Medicine of the National
Academies has already recommended specific food marketing
restrictions.
SOURCE: Associated Press, September 27, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5239

14. THE BEST BOOK EVER?

Haven't had a chance to buy our new book, The Best War Ever?
Wondering what it's all about? Click here to read exclusive passages
from the book. Chapters excerpted include "Not Counting the Dead,"
"Rewriting History," and "Big Impact." We hope you'll take this
opportunity to whet your appetite and will go on to read the book in
its entirety. You can order it online, or ask your local bookseller
if they have it in stock. And after you read it, please consider
posting a review on Amazon to encourage others to read this
important book. And don't forget to visit The Best War Ever website
to watch the great four minute flash video about the book!
SOURCE:
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5265

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| Ask an Expert About the Future of 'Citizen Journalism' |
| from the mainstream-media-is-quaking-in-its-boots dept. |
| posted by Roblimo on Monday September 25, @12:20 (Media) |
| http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/25/1510234 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

People ranging from [0]Doc Searls to [1]J.D. Lasica to [2]Dan Gillmor to
[3]Craig Newmark have talked about how "citizen journalism" is
supplanting and/or augmenting professional reporting. (FYI: One of the
groundbreaking moments in "citizen journalism" happened right here on
[4]Slashdot.) This week's interviewee, NYU professor [5]Jay Rosen, is not
only a long-time proponent of [6]civic journalism, but has now started
[7]NewAssignment.net with seed money from Craig Newmark, a $10,000 grant
from the [8]Sunlight Foundation and, last week, $100,000 from [9]Reuters.
Jay Rosen is obviously not just an academic or theoretician, but is
actually doing things, which means he can answer almost any question you
may have about citizen (or civic) journalism. Usual Slashdot
[10]interview rules apply.

This story continues at:
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/25/1510234

Discuss this story at:
http://interviews.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/09/25/1510234

Links:
0. http://www.searls.com/dochome.html#Bio
1. http://jdlasica.com/aboutjd.html
2. http://citmedia.org/blog/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark
4. http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/07/120249&tid=149
5. http://www.poynter.org/profile/profile.asp?user=102644
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_journalism
7. http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/07/25/nadn_qa.html
8. http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/09/07/slt_gift.html
9. http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/09/20/rts_gft.html
10. http://slashdot.org/faq/interviews.shtml

PUT THIS DOWN ON YOUR SCHEDULE---DEC.4TH A MONDAY IS THE ASAHI SHIMBUN TOUR. THIS IS WORTH 50 POINTS FOR THE COURSE AND EVERY EFFORT SHOULD BE MADE TO ATTEND.

We will be looking at one of the great photojournalists in class next week. Although you will hear Larry Towell denia that he is one, he is! Maybe a more delicate Thompson. He comments that..."Poetry is literature with the water squeezed out of it." Kind of like journalism although we usually allow and want some of the H2O. He added to the last quote that.."When you go into the world you edit much more." That's the KISS of it. You might want to look at the web site for a preview at >http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/

Next weeks assignment is to write a movie or book review. You should mention the directors name and the main characters and actors. Discribe the story and then comment on how well everyone did their job. Deadline is noon on Tue. to carsurf@yahoo.com.

Have some sympathy for the guys running the show. It is in everyones best interest for there to be a sucessful conclusion to the war in Iraq. The trouble is that no one seems to know what is happening, let alone have solutions. Getting the information is difficult or as the opinion below from the Weekly Spin has in impossible.
IRAQ "98 PERCENT OFF-LIMITS" FOR PRESS CORPS
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003122985
"Everyone is kind of groping around in the dark," says New York
Times senior correspondent Dexter Filkins on his return from
reporting in Iraq. Despite employing 70 Iraqi staffers, the civil
war there (Filkins doesn't hedge--"Yeah, sure" it's a civil war) has
meant the Times cannot safely access stories. Its own five
correspondents primarily spend their time pasting together reports
by the Iraqi staff, protected by a small army of 45 security guards,
armored cars, and belt-fed rooftop machine guns. "Nobody trusts
anybody anymore. There's no law, and the worst people with guns are
in charge." The Iraqi reporters know that if their association with
the Times is revealed they may pay with their lives, Filkins told
the Committee to Protect Journalists at a September 14, 2006, talk
in Manhattan where he is preparing to serve a U.S. fellowship. His
advice to other reporters thinking about covering Iraq: "Don't go."
Filkins said that the U.S. military is similarly hamstrung in
getting quality information: soldiers rarely leave their bases and
don't interact much with average Iraqis. Ninety-eight percent of
Iraq, including Baghdad, is too dangerous for reporters to cover, he
said.
SOURCE: Editor and Publisher, September 16, 2006 (sub req'd)
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5227

Your assignment for next week,deadline Monday, is to write a news story about the news you personally thought the most important over the last summer. If appropriate find original sources rather then use just a news story, if it is a news story that you will use. The three new people, two of which have had trouble, should write an introduction to their blogs. If you still have problems we will work them out in the next class. See you next Thur. Clark

Information, news,public relations and propaganda. What are the differences between them? Try to think about this and define what each of the headings ie. info, news, etc. means.
GOVERNMENT PR: YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK
http://federaltimes.com/index.php?S=2060330
"Agencies across government are under increasing pressure to sway
public opinions -- either to win funding from Congress, to satisfy
customers, to recruit new employees, to educate the public about new
programs, to minimize fallout from controversial policies," writes
Mollie Ziegler. With more U.S. federal agencies "applying
sophisticated public relations tools and tactics," government
spending on PR and marketing services skyrocketed from $39 million
in 2001 to more than $400 million for 2006 to date. For example, the
Federal Aviation Administration "hired a PR consultant last year to
help it put a more positive face on its decision to outsource 2,500
jobs, the biggest outsourcing deal yet by an agency." The Defense
Department hired consultants to survey college students, to improve
their branding and recruiting materials. And agencies are still
putting out video news releases, though the Government
Accountability Office ruled that segments that don't make their
government source clear are illegal covert propaganda.
SOURCE: Federal Times (U.S.), August 28, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5127

| Fake News Stories Probed |
| from the truthiness dept. |
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday August 16, @20:24 (The Media) |
| http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/16/2327242 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

An anonymous reader writes "From the article: "The U.S. Federal
Communications Commission has begun an [0]investigation of the use of
video news releases, sometimes called "fake news," at U.S. television
stations. Video news releases are packaged stories paid for by businesses
or interest groups. They use actors to portray reporters and use the same
format as television news stories.""

Discuss this story at:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/08/16/2327242

Links:
0. http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2006/08/16/fake-news-probe.html

The ever present danger of Big Brother manipulating public discourse and perceptions is well illustrated here. Orwell we didn't really expect this, but should have.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| PR Firm Behind Al Gore YouTube Spoof? |
| from the new-intarweb-trolls dept. |
| posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sunday August 06, @18:11 (Republicans)|
| http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/06/209244 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

mytrip writes to tell us ABC News is reporting that a supposed amateur
video posted to YouTube.com may have actually been designed and posted by
a Republican [0]public relations firm called DCI. From the article:
"Public relations firms have long used computer technology to create
bogus grassroots campaigns, which are called 'Astroturf.' Now these firms
are being hired to push illusions on the Internet to create the false
impression of real people blogging, e-mailing and making films."

Discuss this story at:
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/08/06/209244

Links:
0. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2273111&page=1

Here are the first few paragraphs of a well thought out medium long article on, what the writer believes is, the pathetic state of techno journalism. Think about it - read the whole article if you'd like and then think about it some more, and tell me - is he right?
7-28-06
Column: Get That Out of Your Mouth #27
The Next Gonzo Journalism
Column by Chris Dahlen
I keep hearing the same gripe from the critics of the critics of pop culture: Today's writers eat it. Nobody knows how to cover music, or movies, or video games, or any of the other media that matter. We need someone to swoop in and save us: We need a new Lester Bangs, or a new Hunter S. Thompson-- one of those guys who made criticism and alternative journalism seem so vital back in the 1960s and 70s. Where they hell did they go?
Chuck Klosterman writes in Esquire about the failure of the gaming press to cough up a single critic who embodies whatever Bangs was doing when he told people to listen to the Troggs. Old school fans of music crit watch the field slip into the morass of mp3 blogs, message boards, and kids who just shout, "Hey, can you YSI that to me?" every time a new album leaks-- and they wonder, what happened to the great critics? They want a tastemaker, a voice of authority, who can put it all in perspective and knock our heads together with his or her crazy-yet-dead-on arguments.

But I think I've found the answer: We don't have a new Bangs or Thompson yet because pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don't know how to write about technology.

Oh sure, we cover tons of stories about technology. We write up every new thing from could-be-big trends-- whatever happened to the podcast revolution, anyway?-- to tiny but buzzworthy ones, like that "personalized" Jessica Simpson download they're selling at Yahoo! Music. The problem is that every time we write about some new technology like podcasting, we go through the basic template-- explain how it works, decide whether grandmothers will care about RSS feeds, and so forth-- and we quote the same types of people: The early adopter, the industry analyst, the skeptic. And no matter what context the story falls into and how important the subject may seem, the overall tone is always the same: whatever it is, it's "neat."

Here is a very good article defending the newsworthyness of blogs and the choices we make when selecting news. It's written by the great Canadian Science Fiction writer and Creative Commons advocate Cory Doctorow and published by the Canadian Brodcast Corporation:
Truth and the Net
By Cory Doctorow


Trusting what you read on the internet is a dangerous prospect, but it beats the alternative. At least on the internet, you get to choose your bias.

You can't trust what you read online. You can't trust what you read in the paper. You can't trust what you see on TV, or hear on the radio. You can't trust what your friend swears her brother's girlfriend said is true.

You can't trust anything – not with the gospel, bet-your-life trust that you reserve for things like gravity and death and your family.

You never could.

But for a long time, it sure seemed like you could. It seemed like any enterprise to which the CRTC gave a broadcast licence would surely conduct itself with dignity, fairness and accuracy. Anyone with the wherewithal to put a newspaper in your door in the morning, or get a magazine onto the stands surely wouldn't risk seeming wild or foolish by publishing untruths.

In hindsight, we know how wrong that was. Look at the CBC's infamous "Hippie Bill" segment where a young William Gibson (later to become a world-famous science fiction writer, but even then something of a storyteller) guided a gullible camera crew around the hippie paradise of Yorkville, inventing hippie argot and "facts" about the hippie lifestyle.

CBC.ca archives video: Yorkville Hippie haven, 1967

Look at how the New York Times omitted mention of Stephen Colbert's virtuoso performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, in which the comedian scorchingly denounced the press for its failure to address issues of moment in the Bush administration.

Consider the raft of woo-woo magazines advocating the use of crystal pyramids to improve gas-mileage, conspiracy books about alien abductions, racist monthly newspapers, nutjob talk-radio hosts, and the thousand other ways in which the truth is mangled, omitted, or reversed by the press. It's a truism that experts of all kinds wince when they see mainstream press coverage of their disciplines, anticipating the perennial clunkers, errors and mix-ups that characterize all generalist coverage of specialist subjects.

The most important difference between the internet and all the media that came before it is the cost of participation. On the internet, participation is pretty much free — or at least, it's in free-fall, with library terminals, cheap hardware, open WiFi and free training courses making the net available to ever-larger pools of people.

Almost anyone can participate. If having the money to run a publication was ever any kind of proxy for reliability, kiss it goodbye. You can't even count on a site's prominence as a barometer of its truthfulness. Wildly popular sites like the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia can be edited by anyone who comes upon them, anonymously, and those edits show up live the instant they're made.

Media scholar Clay Shirky calls the pre-internet era the "select, then publish" epoch. It was a time when industrialists hired editors to choose from among the pool of available accounts of the world and its workings and publish those that suited their taste best.

Now we're in the era of "publish, then select." Gone is the era of a few news outlets who divide the pool of advertising dollars into substantial chunks and use those chunks to staff a newsroom full of investigative reporters.

Good riddance. We've got something better in "publish, then select" land. Investigative bloggers like Kathryn Cramer — whose hobby is tracking the movements and deeds of mercenary armies — post their initial impressions of a story, with whatever details they've gleaned. A horde of readers converges on the post and sends her corrections, argument, accord, evidence, and opinion. Cramer sifts through this to find what she considers credible and coherent, and adds new posts. In this incremental fashion, a truth emerges. Not the only truth (lots of the subjects of Cramer's posts strenuously object to them and tell her so on her site and on their own), but a truth nevertheless.

Other collaborative projects like Wikipedia — an encyclopedia with more than one million entries that anyone can edit — go one further, deploying elaborate tool-suites so that readers can, with a little effort, see who contributed what to which Wikipedia posts and when. Wikipedia articles are just the surface, beneath which lurks a palimpsest, revealing the chatter, denunciations, and consensus-building that yielded the current version of the truth.

Wikipedia gets it wrong all the time. So do bloggers. But then, so do newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. The interesting thing about systems isn't how they perform when they're working to specification, it's what happens when they fail.

Blogs, Wikipedia, and other online media fail gracefully indeed. When a newspaper gets a story wrong, it can take 24 hours to get a correction out – if it corrects it at all. There's no ready way to link criticism of a newspaper article with the article itself. Certainly, you can't make the edits yourself.

But if you find an error in a Wikipedia entry, you can fix it yourself. You can join the discussion about whether a blogger got it wrong. Automated tools like Technorati link together all the different blogs discussing the same topic, turning them into a conversation.

As advertising dollars are gobbled up by Google, Craigslist and eBay, major media outlets are slashing their newsrooms and their editorial staff, making do with generic syndicated material off the wires, contracting "truth" to a few accounts, a few biases. Meanwhile, "citizen journalists" of publish-then-select are discovering that you can fact-check on the cheap, without a Chumcity or Torstar building behind you, provided you do so *after* you go to press.

The news isn't just something your audience/funders receive in completed parcels. It's something they come to understand by looking at the story from many angles, through a multiplicity of online sources.

A public service broadcaster that wants to truly provide a service to the public can do better than merely producing yet another account of events. It can provide tools to help its audience explore the story as it emerges.

Imagine a future where "public service" news is a set of collaborative online tools that help citizens piece together coherent accounts of events as they unfold: message-boards that let you fly over to get the gist of the conversation, or drill down to see the nitty-gritty of individual discussions. Something that helped users create persistent identities through which their contributions could be permanently linked over time. Something that turned the news into a palimpsest where every buried body could be disinterred and examined for wounds.

Most of all, a public service broadcaster could be the repository for the raw materials of the news: public, freely reusable databases of geodata, audiovisual news morgues, and user-created AV materials that the broadcaster could host permanently in a stable archive. As public service broadcasters around the world developed comparable archives, these could be reciprocally linked, giving Canadians access to the BBC, Britons access to Deutsche Welle, Germans access to Radio France. If bloggers and other citizen journalists represent a future for newsgathering and reportage, public service entities like the CBC should be working to fill in the infrastructure gaps that presently stand between them and a well-rounded, wide-ranging, timely and balanced view of the news.

Meanwhile, it's not sloppiness that compels a blogger to publish before all the facts are in hand. The way a blogger gets all the facts on hand is by publishing, attracting a discussion, and figuring out what's really going on, as best as anyone can figure it.

It's a lot of work, getting to the truth. Reading the newspaper is easy. Choosing whose news to believe is hard — but if it's the truth you're after, and not just some dominant narrative du jour, there's no getting around it.

Do you share Cory Doctorow’s view about the truth of what you read online? Are "citizen journalists" making the online world more trustworthy?

Share your comments »

Cory Doctorow (www.craphound.com) was born in Toronto and lives in London, England. He is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist and co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net). Doctorow is a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, MAKE, the New York Times and other newspapers, magazines and websites. He is a former director of European affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He currently serves on several boards and advisory boards including Participatory Culture Foundation and Technorati, Inc.

Doctorow was a keynote speaker at the CBC.ca Web Ed 2006 conference. He spoke on the limits of copyright online.

Citizen journalists get rewarded
Here is an interesting report from the BBC about this new wave of journalism which comes, as from here, cell phone photographs but also from blogs, web pages and internet discussion boards.

The judges were unanimous in choosing the winning image.

Enlarge Image
A picture taken moments after a bomb exploded on a number 30 bus in London's Tavistock Square on 7 July 2005 has won the first citizen journalism award.
Second prize went to a shot of the Buncefield oil terminal fire taken by a passenger in a plane.

The awards, set up by Nokia and the UK Press Gazette, aim to highlight images shot by citizens witnessing events.

The popularity of camera phones means more images of significant events are reaching news organisations.

I witness

Increasingly the well-known pictures of significant events around the world, such as the bombings in London on 7 July 2005, are coming from citizens rather than professional photographers.

The shot taken of the immediate aftermath of the Tavistock Square bomb was widely publicised in newspapers and on the BBC. The judges of the award were unanimous in choosing it as the winner.

Vicky Taylor, BBC News Interactivity editor and one of the judges, said: "I went with the pictures which were taken by people almost by chance. They did not set out to photograph an event, it just happened in front of them."


David Otway's shot of Buncefield won second prize
Ian Reeves, editor of Press Gazette, said "It's clear from the quality of the entries to these awards that citizen journalism, however you define it, is going to play an increasingly significant role in the industry."

The person who took the Tavistock Square photograph elected to remain anonymous and asked for the prize to be donated to one of the London bombings charities.

The third prize went to another photograph taken of the aftermath of the 7 July bombings. The image was taken by Alexander Chadwick in the tunnels of London's Piccadilly Line as commuters made their way to a station from the bombed train.

To be eligible for the award, pictures had to be taken between 1 May 2005 and 20 April 2006. They also had to have been published in a known magazine, newspaper or broadcast or seen on a self-published blog, citizen journalism site or photo-sharing service.

JUST A FINAL REMINDER THAT THERE IS NO CLASS ON THIS THUR. THE 13TH AS WE MADE IT UP WITH OUR MONDAY TOUR CLASS. I WILL CHECK ALL BLOGS ONE FINAL TIME THIS WEEKEND AND SEND IN THE CLASS MARKS ON TUE. THE 18TH. HAVE A GOOD SUMMER. CLARK

WHEN NEWSPAPERS FALL FOR POLITICAL "DROPS"
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/truth-loses-when-only-half-the-story-will-do/2006/07/02/1151778807051.html?
"Next time you see an 'exclusive' tag on a story about state
politics, stop and have a closer look. The chances are that the
story, far from being a feat of journalistic endeavor, is what we
call in the trade 'a drop,'" writes Anne Davies in the Sydney
Morning Herald. "You'll be able to tell it's a drop because it's
likely to quote one side of politics only. This is often a condition
of the drop." Drops, especially those in Sunday papers, help
politicians influence the week's media agenda. Presenting
government-sanctioned leaks as "exclusives" also helps newspapers
gain a marketing edge over their rivals. Uncritical reporting of a
drop, Davies concludes, "may be of mutual benefit to newspapers and
politicians, but it's certainly not in the public's interest."
SOURCE: Sydney Morning Herald, July 3, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4947

Here is a really great story from the CBC on how a Canadian thinks a war should be fought in the 21st century. What are the chances?
DON MURRAY:
War by other means
July 11, 2006 | More from Don Murray

Don Murray is one of the most prolific of the CBC's foreign correspondents, filing hundreds of reports - in French and English - from China, Europe, the Middle East and the Soviet Union. He is currently based in London as the senior European correspondent for CBC Television News.

During his 30 years with CBC, Murray has covered a multitude of major stories, including the advent of perestroika and glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wrote A Democracy of Despots, a book documenting that collapse and the rebirth of Russia. While in Berlin, he covered the peace agreement ending the war in Bosnia and, in London, covered the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the peace agreement in Northern Ireland. He authored Family Wars, a major feature article for the International Journal paralleling the troubles in Northern Ireland and the war in Bosnia. In recent years he has covered the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.


Von Clausewitz would have approved. The great 19th-century military thinker, the author of On War, was German and clinical. Among his many insights was this one: "When we speak of destroying the enemy's forces we must emphasize that nothing obliges us to limit this idea to physical forces: the moral element must also be considered."
The moral element. This was at the heart of the matter on the field in Berlin and in distressed conversations in France in the wake of its team's loss in the soccer World Cup final against Italy.

What had the Italian player Marco Materazzi said to the incomparable French captain, Zinedine Zidane, that caused him to lose his moral compass and commit a professional foul with 10 minutes to go in the tight game? Zidane headbutted the Italian and was shown a red card by the referee. He was thrown out of the game. France's penalty kicker was banished. Ten minutes later, they lost on penalty kicks.

The French coach, Raymond Domenech, understood immediately and bitterly. The player of the game, he said, was Materazzi: he had destroyed France's chief weapon.

Materazzi had not used physical violence; the French agreed on that. He had used mental violence: he had used words. But which words? Across France, the suppositions and rumours run. He had called Zidane, whose parents are Algerian, a terrorist. He had insulted Zidane's mother. In the crowd, Hamid, like Zidane a Frenchman of Algerian origin, fixed on this second interpretation. Of course Zidane had to react. Materazzi had wounded his family, his very self-esteem.

But in acting, Zidane had lost the battle. Italy lifted the prize. In that country, joy was unconfined. As the team returned in triumph to Rome, the streets filled. This was not the second coming, but the fourth coming of the World Cup to Italy. For Italian fans, it was almost a glimpse of paradise even if the descent to soccer hell may soon follow. Four of Italy’s top domestic teams, for which several of the World Cup stars play during the season, are wrapped in the tentacles of scandal involving match fixing and referee tampering. Within days, the teams may be relegated to the minor leagues.

Paradise glimpsed is far better than Paradise Lost, butted away, many in France think, by the head of Zidane.

Consolation and absolution

The day after the fatal game, the French team had to endure the purgatory of official thanks for being second-best. It began with handshakes from France's embattled president, Jacques Chirac, who can only dream of the popularity the French players enjoy. Then, in the garden of the presidential palace, came consoling words for Zidane. You are a genius of international football, Jacques Chirac told him. You have a great heart and great commitment. France loves you.

The players then travelled five minutes down the road to the Place de la Concorde where once the guillotine had stood. What awaited them was not execution but absolution. A crowd of several thousand faithful bathed them in applause and thanks as they stood on the balcony of a luxury hotel. This raucous outpouring of esteem was directed particularly at Zidane. The talismanic captain had played his last game; he had already announced he was retiring after the World Cup. He was still loved, and greatly.

The affection was also directed at David Trezeguet, whose missed penalty kick lost the championship for France. As the ovation washed up, he broke down. This was not Italy; this was not joy unconfined. But it was full remission for football sins.

One further point: two European nations were pitted against each as the world watched. Yet no one died.

Breaking boredom's bonds

Exactly 90 years ago, European nations were also pitted against one another in battle. On the first day of the battle of the Somme, 20,000 British soldiers died. Almost 400,000 European combatants would be chewed up by the end of the months-long battle. And it was only one of many in the First World War.

The cultural historian George Steiner has advanced the theory that one of the prime causes of that colossal carnage was ennui or spleen – boredom. French poets like Baudelaire were writing about the terrible burden of this ennui decades before. Steiner suggests that European nations rushed headlong into war to break the iron bonds of boredom.

Ennui still stalks the world; nations still square off. But soccer is the preferred form of combat, 22 men in T-shirts and shorts, kicking a round ball. As Von Clausewitz might have said, this is war by other means.

While France forgave its hero Zidane, others were not so kind. 'Zidane-Amok' was the headline in a German tabloid; 'Zid Vicious' was the choice of its British equivalent. Editorialists weighed in with words of censure for his heinous act.

The headbutted Materazzi fell to the ground but rose again to finish the game and raise the championship trophy. No one died.

Consider again the axiom of the German thinker: the moral element must also be considered.

This is.....so.............international!
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| MDN presents 'Manglish - Manga in English' |
| from the dept. |
| posted by Hemos on Monday July 03, @08:07 (Anime) |
| http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/03/1159239 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

[0]Mainichi Daily News writes "Japan's leading English news site
revolutionizes manga -- Manga lovers rejoice! A never-seen-before
approach to manga made its debut on the Mainichi Daily News on Monday,
July 3, 2006. [1]Manglish takes some of Japan's hottest young manga
talents -- showcased in the Mainichi's MangaTown site -- and places their
creations on the MDN in their original Japanese format. However, cool
thing is that while it appears on the site in the original Japanese, but
if you run your mouse over it you get the translation in English.

Discuss this story at:
http://features.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/07/03/1159239

Links:
0. http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/
1. http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/entertainment/etc/manglish/index.html

Censorship? Well no. Really complete control.

Beijing Official Says Curbs Apply to Foreign Journalists
By JOSEPH KAHN
A Chinese draft law threatens to fine news media for
reporting on "sudden incidents" without permission.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/world/asia/04china.html?th&emc=th

Here is a good example on how a large media organization can create their own future stories:
Canada 2020
What will Canada look like in the coming decades?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/canada2020/index.html

The influence of blogs on journalism and the media and the public that reads them all. Excellent article from the BBC on the accuracy challenge for blogging>

Blagging in the blogosphere

VIEWPOINT
Richard Ladle

Blogs are revolutionising the way millions of people around the world keep in touch with environmental issues, but at what cost? Richard Ladle, in this week's Green Room, says the growing popularity of web-based journals is making it harder to sort fact from fiction.


Luiz is worried. He has just read in O Globo, Brazil's premier newspaper, that the Amazon may be completely gone by the year 2050.
Ana, a Brazilian living in the UK reads about the deforestation statistics in Luiz's web diary, otherwise known as a "blog", and is so concerned that she emails it to all her friends.

Joy, Ana's friend from Hong Kong, translates part of Ana's email into Mandarin Chinese and pastes it into her blog, which is read by Cheryl, a primary school teacher in Singapore who decides to discuss deforestation in her class.

And so things go in the borderless, unregulated, democratised world of the internet. Now, we no longer have to rely on the television or the newspapers to find out about the latest scientific advance or environmental catastrophe.

Scientific information and "expert" opinions are literally just a mouse-click away. However, unlike the traditional news media, the internet has no gatekeepers, no reviewers, and no authority to help you distinguish good science from the bad, environmental fact from environmental fiction.

Rise of the blog

The latest craze to sweep across cyberspace is the use of blogs, frequently updated websites that contain a mixture of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, and links to other websites, online journals or diaries.


Despite the growing popularity of blogs they are still viewed with considerable suspicion by both scientists and the general public

Unlike traditional web pages that are essentially static in nature, it is interactions between weblogs which makes them so interesting and influential.

When linked together into intertwining communities, or "blogospheres", they provide a communication platform of incredible power and complexity where information and opinions are exchanged, transformed and reworked with astounding rapidity across international boundaries and time zones.

There are already nearly 12 million weblogs in existence and it is estimated that this number is doubling every five months. However, despite the growing popularity of blogs they are still viewed with considerable suspicion by both scientists and the general public.

A recent international survey of public trust in the media, conducted for the BBC and Reuters, found that internet blogs were the least trusted source of news information, with one in two people unable to say if they trusted them.

The public are right to be cautious. Misrepresentation of environmental science on the internet is widespread and weblogs are by no means a special case. From deforestation rates in the Amazon to climate change statistics, nothing is necessarily how it appears.

Furthermore, unlike most traditional forms of media that have gatekeepers, people whose job it is validate facts, check copy, exert some sort of quality control; the defining characteristic of the blogosphere is its lack of regulation.

Inspire or conspire?

Misreporting and misrepresentation are important because they can lead to a loss of trust at a time when public support for pro-environmental policies is most crucial.

Poor reporting of environmental science may also have a disproportionate effect on children who are increasingly turning the internet as their preferred source of information and who are least able to judge the validity of claims or the legitimacy of one blog over another.

So how should we be responding to the challenges and opportunities presented by the blogosphere?

One way to deal with misrepresentation in blogs is to increase the weight of informed opinions in the blogosphere. An influx of scientifically informed opinion and accurate information would also help combat and correct misrepresentations in the traditional news media and draw public attention to important new research findings.


Whatever precautions are taken there is always scope for being mislead or misdirected and for work to appear out of context
Weblogs could also be used to inspire the next generation of environmentalists. For instance, blogging is the perfect way for field biologists and conservationists to communicate the soap opera quality of working and living in the field.

Furthermore, new wireless communication systems and solar technology now make real-time blogging from the remotest of locations a strong possibility.

The diversity of views that can be found on the internet is one of its greatest strengths. However, associated with such freedom of information is a lack of quality control which can make it hard to sift through the weight of uninformed, misguided or misleading websites and weblogs.

One of the challenges of living in a media world without gatekeepers is that we need to take far more personal responsibility for assessing the quality of scientific information that we receive.

Fortunately, there are several ways in which the credibility of a website or blog can be quickly assessed:


Check the data - strong scientific arguments are based on information from recognised sources that is available for public scrutiny, while weak or spurious arguments are often backed up with data from secondary sources or often no data at all
Take note of the language - arguments couched in hyperbolic language may be masking a lack of understanding or sound information
Whatever precautions are taken there is always scope for being mislead or misdirected and for work to appear out of context - even when the exact figures are readily available for public scrutiny.


In the blogosphere the individual is king and everyone, rightly or wrongly, can become part of the news
This transition from individuals consuming their environmental news from traditional sources such as newspapers and television to selecting their news from the "electronic buffet" of the internet could have profound implications for the environmental movement and, for that matter, news providers such as the BBC.

The challenge has been laid down: how to effectively communicate in this new virtual world of shifting environmental values and consumption patterns?

There are no easy answers but if we don't respond quickly we run the risk of creating a generation of eco-illiterate consumers and voters at a crucial time for the Earth's diminishing resources.

In the blogosphere the individual is king and everyone, rightly or wrongly, can become part of the news. Dangers and opportunities abound and never before has there been a greater responsibility on individuals to be more discriminating news consumers.

But, at the end of the day, if you don't like what you are reading then you can always start your own blog and tell the world about it!

Dr Richard Ladle is director of MSc Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at Oxford University, and a senior partner of Sustainable Solutions Worldwide

The Green Room is a series of opinion pieces on environmental issues running weekly on the BBC News website

A series of thought-provoking environmental opinion pieces
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/5099764.stm

Published: 2006/06/23 07:19:36 GMT

© BBC MMVI

Research is the basis for most good journalism. Here is an article from the New York Times on just that:
ECONOMIC VIEW
Giving It Away, Then and Now
By DANIEL GROSS
The announcement that Warren E. Buffett would donate most
of his fortune to a foundation created by Bill Gates sent
reporters to the history stacks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/business/yourmoney/02view.html?th&emc=th

Reporters can start out poorly educated and dumb but they are forced to become knowledgeble, sensetive and aware of all historical movements. This may be the activity of the rest of your life. Remember that the guys who are doing the xxx thing here are the same ones that excomunicated Leonarod DeVinci and Kazinzakis, actually they also did Coprinicus and anybody else with a brain. Pitiful really.

Excommunication Is Sought for Stem Cell Researchers
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Stem cell researchers should be punished in the same way as
women who have abortions and doctors who perform them, a
senior Vatican official said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/01/world/europe/01vatican.html?th&emc=th

Well talking about subversion of the democracy:

BUSH JOINS IN CONDEMNING N.Y. TIMES
U.S. President George W. Bush has joined the chairman of the House
homeland security committee in denouncing the New York Times for
publishing a story last week about a secret financial-monitoring
program used to trace alleged terrorists.
FULL STORY:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/06/26/congressman-new-york-times.html

A PS to this is that the Canadian government, and I'm sure others, is investigating the possibility that Canadain and International laws were broken with this secret financial-monitoring. Breaking laws has seldom stopped the White House in the past.

Remind me to tell you about the virtual reality world 2nd Life. See you next week for the last class. I have now gotten the video player worked out. Clark

I would like you to spend about 10 min. of your time looking over this web site of Reporters without Borders. Find the PDF of the Webs Black Holes and show it to me in the first 5 min. of class on Thur. and you'll get ten bonus points.

I have gotten some questions about this weeks assignment. A future story that you have to research yourself about the weather,fashion, business,the internet or what ever else you can think about were a future story would be appropriate. Good Luck. See you on Thur. Clark

We've talked about some of the threats to a free and open society and free and open news which is supposed to support it. Here is an article that clearly outlines this problem in the U.S.A. What happens there has often already happened in other places or is just about to.
Check it out at The Nation:>http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060703&s=crispinmiller
Mark Crispin Miller on the Death of News
Although its history is far from glorious, the US press has never been as bad as it is now.
Date filed: 25-06-2006

Along the lines of Tools for Journalists take a look at this:>http://www.mediachannel.org/getinvolved/journo/

Next weeks assignment, and the last one, is a future story. What is going to happen tomorrow,next week or next year in business, the weather or anything else such as fashion. You must not write a fantasy story, it should have basis in fact. We have two more classes. The class on the 13th of July will be off and there will be no class as that will be the make up for the Asahi Tour. Again look back over the last three or four entries and check out the tools for journalists. Clark

| Washington Post Reviews its 10 Years on the Web |
| from the i-also-collect-spores-molds-and-fungus dept. |
| posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday June 19, @19:22 (The Media) |
| http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/19/221222 |
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[0]anaesthetica writes "The Washington Post is featuring three stories
today reviewing their experience in adapting the "old media" to the new
environment of the web. The first article examines their revelation that
'The news, as "lecture," is giving way to the [1]news as a "conversation".'
The second looks at the '[2]Kaiser memo' which served as the germinating
point for what would become WashingtonPost.com, phrased in language that
today seems amusingly quaint. The final article looks at the [3]death of
traditional print newspapers as consumers flock to internet sources for
their news."

Discuss this story at:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/06/19/221222

Links:
0. http://slashdot.org/~anaesthetica/journal/
1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/18/AR2006061800618.html
2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/18/AR2006061800743.html
3. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/13/AR2006061300929.html

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| Earth Sandwich |
| from the no-mayo-mayo-sucks dept. |
| posted by timothy on Monday June 19, @13:22 (It's funny. Laugh.)|
| http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/19/1718219 |
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yourhotneighbor writes "If you haven't seen Ze Frank's hilarious
[0]videoblog, it's worth checking out. A few weeks ago he challenged
visitors to create an "Earth Sandwich" where two pieces of bread are
placed exactly opposite each other on the globe. Google mashups showing
[1]what's on the opposite side of the Earth and [2]a live GeoRSS-based
bread gallery were provided. A piece [3]on NPR this Saturday details the
concept and a team from New Zealand and Spain [4]completed the challenge.
Then on Friday he allowed his show to be written by his viewers who
battled out 2,000+ script revisions in a Wiki. Sunday's New York Times
[5]describes the results."

Discuss this story at:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/06/19/1718219

Links:
0. http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/06/061206.html
1. http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/tool.html
2. http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/status.html
3. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5492174
4. http://scourist.com/2006/06/09/0009-earth-sandwich/
5. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/fashion/sundaystyles/18ze.html

Please look at the entry before this one....and then maybe you should tatoo this next URL on the inside of your left thumb.;>}
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm
YOU WILL FIND SOME OF THE BEST TOOLS TO HELP YOU BECOME THE 'YOU' YOU NEED TO BE TO BE A GREAT JOURNALIST

Well the Asahi tour was again very good. Only 13 students came however and 20 had commited to come. At any rate I have just run across a wonderful idea 'The Twelve Things Journalists Should Know About.......' and the illustrated example is interviewing people about the future. Everyone please check it out and we will discuss it next class. Twelve Things Journalists Need To Know to be Good Futurist/Foresight Reporters:>http://www.openthefuture.com/2006/06/twelve_things_journalists_need.html< Have a good day, week, month, year, decade, life.

Well this coming Monday the 19th of June is the big day for the Asahi Newspaper tour. You are all expected to come and will be given an additional 50 points for attending. We will meet at 12:50 infront of the Asahi Newspaper Building. See you there. Clark

Hi we will be looking at CBC.ca the Canadian Broadcasting site and interviews with their foreign correspondents next class, you might want to check them out ahead of time, or not ;>}. Your assignment for this week as a local story and you have to attribute at the end or in the story at least three different sources. The idea is that the more points of view that you investigate the better the reporting and the final story. Also I have posted class pictures on flickr. Check my website for the address. See you on Thur. I'll be looking at your blogs tomorrow. Clark

Good Reporting? What is it? Well here's an example:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Crashing the Wiretapper's Ball |
| from the hardly-shocking dept. |
| posted by Zonk on Thursday June 01, @11:32 (Security) |
| http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/01/156213 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

An anonymous reader writes "Wired is running an article with some great
investigative journalism. Writer Thomas Green [0]snuck into the ISS World
Conference, a trade show featuring communications-tapping equipment and
normally a press-free event. There, he got some very interesting quotes
from the attendees." From the article: "You really need to educate
yourself ... Do you think this stuff doesn't happen in the West? Let me
tell you something. I sell this equipment all over the world, especially
in the Middle East. I deal with buyers from Qatar, and I get more concern
about proper legal procedure from them than I get in the USA."

Discuss this story at:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/06/01/156213

Links:
0. http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71022-0.html

It's a dangerous job but someone has to do it - don't they?
IRAQ THE MOST DEADLY WAR FOR REPORTERS
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002577061
The Iraq war "is now the deadliest war for reporters in the past
century," reports Editor and Publisher. Seventy-one journalists and
26 media support staff have been killed in Iraq since 2003. That
compares to 69 journalists killed in World War II, 63 in Vietnam and
17 in Korea. In addition, at least 42 journalists have been
kidnapped in Iraq, according to Reporters Without Borders. As the
New York Times notes, "it is Iraqi journalists who have been most at
risk. Just this month, three Iraqi reporters were killed in a
two-week period." The news comes as CBS reports that two of its crew
members were killed in Iraq. Cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman
James Brolan are believed to be "the first embedded journalists to
die since 2003."
SOURCE: Editor and Publisher, May 29, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4837

Just got this from the publisher:7copies of Writing and Reporting News , 4th ed have just arrived here.
The bookstore will recieve them tomorrow.

Can you buy the truth? From the New York Times:
An investigation of military propaganda in Iraq warns that
paying for positive stories could damage U.S. credibility
there and undermine the concept of a free press.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/world/middleeast/24propaganda.html?th&emc=th

What might be happening in the media world. Here is a col. by a well known Canadian writting for the Globe and Mail Canada's priemier paper.
Social networks are hot, but where's all the cash?


If septuagenarian billionaire Rupert Murdoch wanted to stir things up in the media industry, he couldn't have picked a better way to do it than by paying more than half-a-billion dollars for a website that most media executives had probably never heard of.

The MySpace.com deal sent shock waves through the traditional media world, which is busy trying to grapple with the fragmentation caused by the rise of blogs and Web-based content, and also through the ranks of the on-line giants such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

Since the deal was announced last summer, the various players have been scrambling to find their own way into the "social networking" space, whether by buying on-line communities -- such as Vancouver-based Flickr.com and del.icio.us, both of which were bought by Yahoo -- or by partnering with existing players. Last year, media and entertainment giant Viacom bought NeoPets.com, an on-line community aimed at preteens, a market many advertisers see as a key growth area. And there were reports earlier this year that Facebook.com, a social networking site aimed at university students, was pitching itself to potential buyers at a valuation of $2-billion (U.S.).

Some of those who were around in the late nineties may feel as though they've seen this movie before, back when the hot "social networks" were Web page communities known as GeoCities, Tripod, Homestead and theglobe.com. For those who are keeping track at home, Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999 for $3.5-billion, and Lycos, which bought Tripod, was acquired by Mexican media giant Terra for $12.5-billion.

The latest move in the social networking space came last week from AOL, the former Time Warner basket case, which announced a MySpace-style social network called AIM Pages. Designed as an extension of AOL's instant messenger product, known as AIM, the new service includes the ability to create blogs. Like Yahoo and Microsoft, AOL is trying hard to find ways of leveraging its massive subscriber base (49 million, in AOL's case).

One of the sticky issues that both AOL and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. will have to confront, however, is how to justify the money they are spending on social networks. In the end, all those supposedly loyal users have to get converted into money, or "monetized" as financial types like to say.

It's true that based on certain estimates, MySpace is the second most-visited website in the world, with almost 30 billion page views in March -- almost twice as many as the Time Warner network (including AOL) and almost three times as many as eBay. And MySpace has about 70 million users. But it's not clear how much money it is actually making. Certainly not as much as eBay.

Even in terms of revenue, MySpace is well behind other sites that are about the same size. Its page-view number was just a shade less than Yahoo's 32 billion (for March), and yet the site's estimated revenue of $200-million for this year pales in comparison with Yahoo's almost $6-billion.

The bottom line is that Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL have been able to gain substantial amounts of ad revenue from their users, but so far MySpace has not. And that is a hurdle faced by many social networking sites. How can you monetize those users without pushing them away or ruining your brand?

According to recent estimates gathered by The New York Times, MySpace has an advertising rate (known as the CPM or cost per thousand) of about 10 cents, which means advertisers are only willing to pay 10 cents for every 1,000 page views. Some Web networks charge as much as $2 per 1,000, and established media sites can charge as much as $10.

Web advertising experts say there are two reasons why MySpace may not be getting as much for its ads: One is that the number of page views it generates seems abnormally large, and advertisers may be suspicious of how valuable each one is; and the second reason is that MySpace is seen as a hangout for teens, who are a notoriously fickle market.

According to a recent article in the Financial Times, MySpace is talking with both Google and Microsoft about a partnership that would involve search-based advertising on MySpace. A similar deal was signed last year between Google and AOL, in a deal that was worth about $1-billion to Time Warner.

At the same time, however, anyone who is considering either investing in or advertising on a site like MySpace or Facebook has to be thinking not just about the fate of GeoCities and Tripod, but also about a service such as Friendster, which was arguably as big a deal three years ago as MySpace is now. At its peak, Friendster had 20 million users, but now it is a mere fraction of its former size.

What happened? Some analysts believe Friendster didn't have enough features to retain users. It also suffered from performance issues as it tried to cope with phenomenal growth. But in the end, it may simply have been a victim of the shifting enthusiasms of its young audience, who grew up and moved on. In many ways, social networking sites are like hot nightclubs -- they become popular and then flame out as the hip crowd moves on, and they are very difficult to manufacture.

Oh yes, and one more thing: For what it's worth, Friendster never figured out how to make money either.

Mathew Ingram writes analysis and commentary for globeandmail.com

mingram@globeandmail.com

OK here is the update for this week. I have ordred seven text books from the publisher. They should be here next week. I have recieved a few more resends of podcasts and wil review all I have on Sunday afternoon. Your assignment over the next two weeks is to find a story somewhere on the campus and do a vidio news broadcast. The media centre on the 6th floor of building 15 the Gucher building has been told you will be coming. They have five cameras and say that they can all be used at any one time. Have a good week. PS if you were around Aoyama last night you should have reported on the big fire. Clark

Hi well only one person even came close to submitting the podcast on time. Most people not at all. I have contacted the publisher of our text book and they will airmail copies to Japan after I tell them how many I need. Please be prepared,this Thur., to tell me if you wish me to order me a copy. Clark

Here's this weeks assignment update due on Monday May 22nd at noon at carsurf@dragon.email.ne.jp. You should send in a Podcast, a ½ to one minute sound file report on some business activity. We talked about how to in class but if you missed it or still have trouble check out the media centre in the Goucher Building on campus and they should beable to help you. Good Luck. Clark

OK take a look at this report from Tokyo in the New York Times:

In Tokyo, the New Trend Is 'Media Immersion Pods'
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
In the world's most media-saturated city, people take a
break by checking themselves into warrens cluttered with
computers, TV's, video games and every other entertainment
of the electronic age.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/arts/14heff.html?th&emc=th

Hi here is the new e-mail address where you should send your stories >carsurf@yahoo.com
Also one note about censorship on the blogsphere. As you are using school computers and this is a Christian University some care should be taken to keep language within acceptable bonds. That would be what you and your peers feel comfortable with. See you next week. Looking forward to your obituaries this Sunday deadline at five o'clock. Clark

What would be worse, losing your job or your life:
Iraq more deadly to journalists than Vietnam, WWII
Last Updated Fri, 05 May 2006 15:18:03 EDT
CBC Arts

There have been 74 journalists killed in Iraq since 2003, according to Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation dedicated to freedom of the press.

Lisa Ramaci-Vincent, widow of slain journalist Steven Vincent touches the name of her husband on a memorial honouring journalists who died on the job, including 59 who died in 2005. (Mannie Garcia/AP)

More journalists died in Iraq than in either the Second World War or the conflict in Vietnam and Cambodia.

The names of 59 journalists who died on the job in 2005 were added to the Freedom Forum Journalists Memorial in Arlington, Va., on Wednesday. That number included 23 killed in Iraq.

The names of the journalists were read aloud and followed by a chime during a ceremony held at the memorial.

Among the dead were two cameramen for Associated Press Television News. Saleh Ibrahim, 33, was killed by gunfire in Iraq after shooting footage in the aftermath of an explosion. Mir Nawab, 34, died in Pakistan when his bus was attacked as he returned from covering the surrender of a tribal militant.

Three months ago, World News Tonight co-anchor Bob Woodruff and Canadian cameraman Doug Vogt were seriously injured in a roadside bomb attack just north of Baghdad. Both are still recovering from their injuries.

ABC News president David Westin paid tribute to journalists who died on the job.

"We never, ever want anyone to lose his life in reporting the news," he said. "But the simple, harsh fact is that there are stories so important that some journalists volunteer to take the risk on behalf of all of us."

Among those honoured were Steven Vincent, 49, a freelance journalist who had written for the Christian Science Monitor, National Review and the New York Times. He was killed in Basra, Iraq, after he and his translator were kidnapped.

Vincent's widow, Lisa Ramaci-Vincent, said she valued the tribute because Vincent wasn't a permanent employee of a major news organization. "The fact he was considered to have given his life for truth and freedom, he deserves to be a hero," she told Associated Press.

Three journalists died in the United States: two in car accidents, and one who contracted malaria after working in Namibia.

The memorial, a spiral-shaped structure made of glass panels that change colour as they catch the sunlight, now bears the names of 1,665 journalists, dating back to 1812. The annual ceremony marks World Press Freedom Day.

 

Someone is watch and reporting:
| Reporters Without Borders Internet Annual Report |
| from the it-doesn't-look-good dept. |
| posted by Zonk on Thursday May 04, @17:27 (Censorship) |
| http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/04/2018232 |

kratei writes "The BBC is running a report discussing the [0]Reporters
Without Borders internet annual report 2006. The RWB study details and
decries [1]the rising tide of net censorship and lays the blame squarely
on the west as the source for the technology that allows repressive
regimes to stifle freedom on the web." From the article: "China's success
at censorship means it has effectively produced a "sanitised" version of
the internet for its 130 million citizens that regularly go online. The
wide-ranging scrutiny also means that it is the biggest jailer of
so-called cyber dissidents. RSF estimates that 62 people in China have
been jailed for what they said online. "

Discuss this story at:
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/05/04/2018232

Links:
0. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4973114.stm
1. http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=578

Here is a really long transcript of a speech on Journalism which is well worth reading, so please give it a try, it is in many way state of the art:
Home » Dan Gillmor's Blog

My NYC Talk on Journalism Principles and Future

Dan Gillmor's Blog, Posted 05/02/06 by Dan Gillmor

Thanks again to Columbia University for inviting me this week to give the annual Hearst New Media Lecture. The audience was terrific and asked great questions (I don't have a transcript of that part, sorry.) What follows is the talk as I wrote it out, beginning after the various thank-yous to the folks who invited me (special thanks to Sree), though I did stray frequently from the written text.
I'm honored to have been invited. I'm also grateful. During the past few years I've had the privilege of working in a field that really led to this conversation we're going to have tonight. There have been ups and downs along the way. But it's been a great ride so far.

I spent more than a decade at the San Jose Mercury News, the daily newspaper of Silicon Valley. One of the ways I tended to classify some of the people I met in the technology industry was by dividing them into groups we might call the managers and the engineers. That's software and hardware engineers, not the kind who drive trains.

Here's a story I once heard. Or maybe I saw it on the Internet. Whatever, it's not original with me.

So it's lunchtime, and some managers at a software company are on their way out to a local restaurant. One of them peers up at the flag, waving in a mild breeze, and wonders aloud how tall the flagpole is. Now this is Silicon Valley, where when you have an idea you're supposed to act on it. One of them has a tape measure in his car, which he retrieves. The managers start hoisting each other up, attempting to measure the height of the thing, but they're falling all over each other and generally making a mess of it.

Meanwhile, a couple of software engineers have stopped to observe the somewhat chaotic scene. They look at each other and nod, then tell the managers to stand out of the way for a second, which by now they are only too glad to do. The engineers lift the pole out of its stand, lay it flat on the grass, take the tape and measure the thing. They give the answer to the managers and head off to their own lunch.

One of the managers looks to the others, shakes his head and says, "Typical engineers. We want the height and they give us the length."

I'm not an engineer, and I'm definitely not a corporate manager. But I like that story, because it reminds me how easily we see things in certain ways and fail to recognize or appreciate the alternatives.

This is called a "New Media" lecture. Two items: First, We are moving at light speed to a time when the expression "new media" will too many words, and we'll drop the new part; it'll just be media. I'm glad to see this school and the organizations that hire its graduates are adopting at least some of tomorrow's techniques more quickly than I predicted. That's good. Forward-looking folks are aware that there's no alternative, not to mention the fact that the journalism will benefit.

Second, I want to make this a conversation sooner than later. Eveything I've been working on in the past few years is about an evolution of journalism from the lecture mode of the past to something much closer to a conversation. That's a shift I consider absolutely essential for all of journalism's constituencies.

I don't have to tell anyone here about the turmoil in the news business over the past few years. If I noticed it a bit earlier than some, we can chalk that up partly to circumstance.

When I was writing my column for the San Jose Mercury News, We were a growing newspaper, loaded with ambition and the resources to do something about it. I was extremely well compensated -- for a newspaper guy, at any rate -- and free to follow my instincts. I used to wake up mornings thinking I'd won the journalism lottery.

Now the Mercury News is a much-diminished organization. It still has some of the best journalists and people I've know, is about to be sold to a newspaper group whose management will likely make the staff yearn for the days when the man some folks called Darth Ridder was running the company.

I'm not here to say newspapers have a right to survive. And I'm not here to say that professional journalists -- that is, people paid to produce news reports -- have a right to their jobs. Being in Silicon Valley helped me understand and appreciate this.

In our age of accelerating change, the force that the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction" guarantees that the blend of innovation, free markets and individual liberty are inevitably disruptive to business models. Creative destruction, which has slammed into the journalism field like so many others, obliges us all to keep learning and reinventing our own lives and careers. There are scary parts to this, but if we welcome innovation, while nourishing free markets and liberty with fairness and social responsibility, we will do better than under other systems.

I am here to say a few obvious things. One is the blatantly observable fact that the practice of journalism is evolving -- and at a pace so quick as to be stunning for such a conservatively run business. I'm also hoping to stretch some definitions, and maybe some boundaries, all in service of better journalism for the future.

On my blog in early 2005 I posted an essay-in-progress. It was called "The End of Objectivity (Version 0.91)." I suggested that the journalism of the new century would be better served if we all considered abandoning the worthy ideal of objectivity and replacing it with a collection of honored principles, only one of which was not already embedded in tradition. Now, by reinforcing those principles with the emerging tools of a Digital Age, we can create something even better.

By giving that blog posting a version number of less than 1.0, I wasn't just making a techie joke. I was calling attention to another reality of tomorrow's journalism. In a craft that's shifting from lecture to conversation, the publication (or broadcast or whatever) is not The End. It is somewhere in the middle of an emergent system in which we all can keep learning, and teaching.

This is increasingly doable in part because of what has changed so much for so many: the collision of technology and media, which has helped democratize communications and is turning traditional notions of journalism in new directions. Now, I don't mean democratization so much as in the sense of voting -- though collective community thinking is an intriguing and valuable part of what's coming. I mean it in the sense of wide participation.

The democratization starts with the tools of creation. They're widely available -- the computer I carry around came off the shelf with media tools that were simply unavailable a few years ago except to a highly skilled and well-paid professionals. These tools are increasingly powerful and decreasingly expensive, thanks to technology's relentless progress, and getting easier to use all the time.

They're also connected to a somewhat democratized digital communications system. I say "somewhat" because two of America's most control-freakish businesses -- namely the phone and cable companies -- are working hard to hijack the Internet for their own purposes, in ways that are flat-out dangerous to innovation and, I'd argue, our very future. I'll come back to this a bit later.

Today, at any rate, the democratization of tools and distribution has led to a related opening: of access.

Of all the major constituencies of journalism, the most important by far is what I like to call the "former audience" and what NYU's Jay Rosen, author of the great Pressthink blog, has dubbed the "people formerly known as the audience." (I don't know which of us said it first, so I'll give us both credit.)

We, the former audience, have been freed from the constraints of the manufacturing model of the 20th Century. And, more and more, we are taking advantage of our liberation. We never had to be satisfied merely with the newspaper dropped on our doorstep in the morning, or the half-hour broadcast in the evening, but it used to take some effort to assemble a more diverse and nuanced report. No longer. Now we can stop being couch potatoes and engage with the news. We can roll our own reports, from whatever sources of traditional and nontraditional media we wish, based on our own choices and recommendations from others.

Even better, we can join the emergent conversation. We can talk about and with the professionals, at least some of them. And if we wish -- as more and more people do -- we can create our own content and conversations. Not much of that latter effort is journalism in any traditional sense, but some of it plainly is, and amid the noise of the rest there is a great deal of signal, if we can just find and identify it.

The second most important of journalism's major constituencies consists of the newsmakers, the people and institutions we cover. They're learning that something new is happening to them. Members of the newsmakers' own constituencies -- of which journalists are just one -- are engaging in conversations about the newsmakers and what they do, and the old ways of communicating are being disrupted. At the same time, the newsmakers can and should be using these conversational tools to engage their various publics, internal and external, and in general to be more transparent in a world that increasingly demands and rewards openness.

The least important major constituency of journalism is, well, us: the journalists. That is NOT do say we don't matter. We do matter -- a lot. Journalism is an honorable and vital craft. It's essential to the welfare of a self-governed people, at least when we do it right. But we also know that journalism is about service. The public trust is a deeper calling than merely diverting readers, listeners and viewers from their everyday existence. At its core journalism must be about helping them conduct democracy's crucial conversations.

Trying for objectivity makes some sense in a media ecosystem that lacks diversity. If a few voices overwhelm all the others, there is a public interest in playing stories as allegedly down the middle as possible. That means not favoring one side over the other -- or others, to be more precise, as there are rarely just two sides to any issue. There have been sound business reasons to try to be "objective," too, not least that a newspaper or network didn't want to make large parts of its audience angry. No doubt, too, the lawyers have an easier time defending against libel suits when the organization can point to a process that aims for objectivity.

I'm in a mood, as the media ecosystem grows more diverse, to rethink all of this. I'd propose replacing the ideal of objectivity with some principles that may be easier to achieve. When we combine and augment them with new ways of presenting and discussing the news, they will be useful to journalists and news consumers of all kinds.

Incidentally -- apparently I have to say this in these kinds of settings -- I am not, contrary to some suggestions, out to boost citizen journalism by tearing down the traditional model. I hope to help create the conditions for a media and journalism ecosystem that's more diverse, vibrant and competitive, that includes all of the above, and not replace one flawed system with another. We need all, and they all need to be better.

The principles that collectively go beyond objectivity are thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, independence and transparency. Of course, they tend to bleed into each other, and in a several cases can even conflict or at least be somewhat orthogonal. I put this problem into the category of "Life is messy."

We all know what it means to be thorough, to keep digging and never assume we know everything. We know that accuracy is getting our facts straight. We know fairness -- however more difficult to quantify -- when we see it. Independence can include being financially independent, or having independence of thought and an eagerness to challenge our own assumptions. Transparency, the quality least in evidence in traditional journalism, though it's at long last coming into its own, is revealing biases and connections where they exist -- a crucial feature of a citizen media where true independence from the topic may likely be rare -- and exposing our inner workings to some sunshine.

Technology, deployed the right way, can give these principles a practical boost beyond anything we've seen in the non-digital media. Let's look at at examples -- a non-comprehensive list -- of what might be possible.

If accuracy starts off as a simple matter of facts, traditional and "new" journalists alike could do us all a favor by telling us what they don't know, not just what they do. On the Web, in a medium where space (and time) and layout constraints are less of an issue, we can take that a step further and invite the audience to fill us in, to help us get the actual rest of the story, or more of it.

We can also point directly, via hyperlinks -- the elemental unit of the Web -- to reference and original source materials as well as other information that supports, or maybe challenges, what we are reporting. In a journalism where being a guide counts as much as being an oracle, authority rises the more we point to other people's work -- if it's the best material on the topic or adds vital nuance or information. Yet only recently have Big Media websites started pointing outside of their own domains, and there's still obvious -- and I believe foolish -- worry about letting go of the audience. As blogging pioneer Dave Winer has said, and this is a paraphrase, "Send them away and they'll keep coming back."

And if accuracy means anything, it means correcting our inevitable mistakes quickly and prominently. On the Net, and with print in particular, we are blessed with an array of choices in how to do this. For example, we can use the "s" tag in HTML, which literally puts a strike-through line through the mistaken text, and then add the corrected material. Or we can just make it right, adding a tag line at the bottom of the posting explaining that such and such has been corrected. Audio, graphical and video errors can likewise be fixed in place.

(I'll note here that the better bloggers are among the most avid correcters of their own mistakes; their reputations rise and fall on their credibility, at least for the ones I read, and a stand-up admission of error wins the writer points for credibility -- at least if the mistakes don't happen repeatedly.)

In all such online cases, we do what newspapers and traditional broacasts cannot do: limit the damage and prevent the next person who's new to the story from getting the wrong information. I don't know about you, but when I read the corrections on Page 2 of the paper about stories that ran two or three days ago, I don't consider myself entirely enlightened. And, of course, when is the last time you recall a correction of an error on, say, the local TV station's "news" program?

The Net's superiority goes much deeper, though it has barely been tapped. For instance, I might like to be notified by e-mail if certain stories -- ones I choose -- have been corrected or updated in any significant way.

Let's focus on the word "updated" for a moment. In the journalism of tomorrow, as I noted earlier, we don't need to think in the publication or broadcast metaphors from the age of literally manufactured media, where the paper product or tape was the end of the process.

If Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood folks can create directors' cuts of their movies, why can't journalists do keep updating and improving some of their own works?

Ah, you ask, what about the historical record?

That's an easy one. Over at the much-criticized Wikipedia, every version of the article -- and I mean everything, down to the version where someone added a comma and hit the save button -- is available to anyone who wants to see it. You can even compare adjacently edited versions side by side.

Let's say I'm a reader who's new to, oh, the turmoil in Nepal, where the King is trying to avoid civil war with apparently modest political liberalization. Let's imagine, in my parallel universe of journalism, that the New York Times did its first in-depth story on the troubles there a couple of years ago and has been updating it on the Web to reflect new events -- this in addition to writing current news stories.

Maybe, being fresh to the story, all I want to do is see the current version so I can catch up. Or maybe I'd like to read the the original article -- call it the baseline copy -- and then the current one to see what's changed. Or maybe I want to see them mashed together, with the changes highlighted using colors for additions and strike-throughs for deletions.

The same could work for a blog posting by some well-connected Nepal citizen who's covering the story from home. Do I want to go back through a year's worth of postings? Probably not. But if he or she has an updated baseline posting, that would be another useful place to look.

The idea isn't new, really. The Associated Press has been using what's called the "write-through" forever -- adding new information to breaking news and telling editors what's new in the story. Let's do that for everyone, on the Web page and in a comprehensive and easy-to-understand way.

Now making this work on the page is basically a software problem -- if we want to do it. Maybe it's a nontrivial problem, as my engineer friends might say, but it's definitely solvable, and I'd recommend it.

Let's talk for a minute about fairness. Why not give people better ability to reply to what we say about them, and the audience better ways to follow and participate in that conversation. Allowing, or better yet, encouraging people to post comments is a good start, provided the comment system is handled in a way that doesn't degenerate into abusive name-calling from anonymous trolls. But how about letting the reader split the screen, and see how the person written about in the story responds alongside the original in context, if that's the reader's preferred way?

If the person talking back tells lies, journalists should note them, again in context. Fairness means listening to different viewpoints and incorporating them into the journalism, but it doesn't have to include parroting or accepting lies or distortions. That practice -- in whatever form -- amounts to the lazy equivalence that leads some journalists to get opposing quotes and give them undue weight when the facts overwhelmingly support one side. As someone said, you don't have to quote neo-Nazis for a story about the Holocaust.

How can technology support transparency? In many ways.

I don't call myself a journalist anymore, at least not the kind I was when I was writing for big newspapers. But I still offer observations on the topics that are important to me. I also have a page on Center for Citizen Media site called "Dan's Disclosures," where I lay out formal connections, financial and otherwise, that I have to several people and companies doing work in areas related to my own. And if I mention them in my blog, I note the connection in the posting and add a link to the full disclosures page.

Transparency can mean asking for help. When I was researching my book, I posted the full outline -- thousands of words -- on my blog. Then, as I was writing, I posted chapter drafts. I was looking for help in writing a better book, and got it. Even my column sometimes benefited from this approach; I'd post a blog item saying I was working on some topic or another, and that my thinking was going in a certain direction, and what did my readers think about that?

No, I didn't announce what I was working on if I thought I had a scoop, and I wouldn't suggest that others do that in most cases. But there are plenty of situations where announcing one's intentions ahead of time will produce better journalism, of whatever kind.

Transparency at Big Media can take the form of pulling back the curtains a bit, helping readers or viewers understand how news stories, and decisions about stories, get made. How far should this be taken? It would be absurd to expect reporters to scan and post on the Web the scrawlings from their notebooks.

But there's nothing wrong with acknowledging our biases, whether personal and institutional, and letting readers make up their own minds about whether to trust what we then report. At the least, the black-box school of journalism, where information goes in and our oracular lectures come out, is no longer acceptable. Necessity requires some discretion, but the public rightly wants more transparency than it's been getting.

With bloggers and other conversational media, biases tend to be up-front, though the blogosphere is hardly free of sleazy manipulation. People like the South Dakota bloggers who were on a candidate's payroll without disclosing their interest should be shunned by readers, in my opinion.

Transparency can boost authority. At a time when saying "Trust me" without evidence is an invitation to mistrust and ridicule, we'll gain more than we lose with transparency.

I've talked a fair amount about openness here. This is not only an issue for journalists in their own work. It's one of the most important policy issues facing us all. If you think media consolidation is an issue today, it's nothing compared with what we're facing tomorrow.

Earlier, I mentioned a clear and present danger to the open Internet that has nurtured a more diverse media ecosystem. The threat, in America, is the dominance of the cable and phone companies in what we laughingly call broadband data connections. I say "laughingly" because the U.S. is falling way, way behind the rest of the developed world in providing broadband access, and one reason is the dominance of companies that grew up in an environment where they dominated their worlds, and really preferred it that way.

The cable and phone companies want to control not just the pipes through which our data moves. They also want to decide what will get delivered, in what order, and at what speed. They haven't pulled this off yet, but they're getting closer every day.

Yesterday, a committee in the House of Representatives voted down an amendment to a new bill that would have required what many of us call "network neutrality." This is the idea that the people getting data -- you and me -- should make the decisions on what we get and in what order, and if necessary pay more for higher speeds. It should not be a decision made by Verizon or Comcast or Time Warner or the fake new ATT.

If they succeed in capturing the kind of control they want -- and they're closer than I would have believed possible -- we'll all be harmed.

I beg you to write and call your member of Congress and U.S. senators, and your state representatives -- the duopoly is well-wired, in the wrong way, in our state capitals, too. Tell them you want an open Internet, not a walled garden or fortress where giant companies get to pick what innovations will succeed or fail.

So much for politics. But before I get to the Q&A, which is bound to be more interesting than what has come before, allow me to make one more pitch.

I've started a new Center for Citizen Media, affiliated with the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and I have lots of ideas and plans. But I also need lots of help. If you're interested in working on projects with me, please let me know.

Here's a new one from the New York Times and there are three words in this article which you need to know. Check it out.

SERVICES SCIENCE
Although computer science is now a fixture in higher education, a couple of
decades ago academic purists scoffed at the idea that it was a real science
-- and argued that any discipline to which the word "science" has to be
fixed is no science at all. Now the same kind of debate is taking place
about "services science." New York Times journalist Steve Lohr says that
"scientists and engineers tend to regard what is taught in business schools
as a mushy combination of anecdotes, success stories and platitudes, wrapped
in jargon. Put a few success stories together, and they become a 'best
practice'." But one of service science's strongest defenders, Cal-Berkeley
professor Henry Chesbrough, argues: "We in academia have to find ways to
contribute research to improving our economic performance in services and to
help students succeed in this knowledge-based services economy." IBM, which
previously championed computer science, is now championing services science
by sponsoring workshops, awarding research grants and helping develop course
materials. In fact, IBM is itself one of the best examples of the shift
toward services, for it has evolved from being just a computer maker to a
company that 's moving into sophisticated technology services for every
aspect of business. (New York Times 18 Apr 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.

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