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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local TV Newscasts Expanding
Tim Parker for The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

By Mark Hosenball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GREEN BOOK

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

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

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

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

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

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

"LARGE NUMBER OF EMAILS"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here, now in Japan there is a new awareness and sensitivity to energy consumption and the question has come up about which is the most energy efficient media for distributing the news? Print, T.V.,radio, internet, telephony ie, twit etc. What do you think?

The comic book of Journalism has arrived and you can take a look at the first chapter.The Influencing Machine
culturebox:
entries
12
The Goldilocks Number
By Brooke Gladstone
Posted Thursday, May 19, 2011, at 7:32 AM ET
PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...REPRINTSSINGLE PAGE

The following comes from Brooke Gladstone's new book, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, illustrated by Josh Neufeld. Read Gladstone's explanation of the book and a first excerpt about journalistic objectivity here. http://www.slate.com/id/2291942?wpisrc=newsletter_tis

This is something that we talked about a short time ago..the use of fictitious numbers were real one are hard to find or the reporter is just lazy.

The real danger of personalised news is that you don't get what you need to know only what you want to know.
The Rise of Filter Bubbles
| from the sound-of-your-own-voice dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Sunday May 15, @23:21 (Censorship)
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0044236/The-Rise-of-Filter-Bubbles?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
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eldavojohn writes "Eli Pariser gave a talk at TED which posits that
tailoring algorithms are creating 'filter bubbles' around each user,
restricting the information that reaches you to be — unsurprisingly —
only what you want to see. While you might be happy that your preferred
liberal or conservative news hits you, you'll never get to see the
converse. This is because Google, Facebook, newspaper sites and even
Netflix filter what hits you before you get to see it. And since they
give you what you want, you never see the opposing viewpoints or step
outside your comfort zone. It amounts to a claim of censorship through
personalization, and now that every site does it, it's becoming a
problem. Pariser calls for all sites implementing these algorithms to
embed in the algorithms 'some sense of public life' and also have
transparency so you can understand why your Google search might look
different than someone with opposing tastes." Hit the link below to watch
a video of Pariser's talk.

Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0044236/The-Rise-of-Filter-Bubbles?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

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| Tenth Annual AusCERT Conference Kicks Off
| from the gentlemen-start-your-computers dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Monday May 16, @01:55 (Australia)
| https://it.slashdot.org/story/11/05/16/0259231/Tenth-Annual-AusCERT-Conference-Kicks-Off?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email

What drives the news in the internet age? Here is one report:
Drudge Generates More News Traffic Than Social Media
| from the nobody-cares-about-your-day dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Monday May 09, @11:15 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/157222/Drudge-Generates-More-News-Traffic-Than-Social-Media?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

tcd004 writes "A report released today by the Pew Research Center's
Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the Drudge Report is a
far more important driver of online news traffic than Facebook or
Twitter. In fact, for the top 25 news websites, Twitter barely registers
as a source of traffic. The report hits on several other [0]interesting
findings about news behavior."

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/157222/Drudge-Generates-More-News-Traffic-Than-Social-Media?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/05/pew-the-drudge-report-drive-more-top-news-traffic-than-twitter-or-facebook.html

For Journalists, a Call to Rethink Their Online Models
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: May 10, 2011



Columbia University has surveyed the state of digital journalism, and it has concluded that journalists must rethink their relationships — and their audiences’ relationships — with advertisers.
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The classified section of KSL, a TV station in Salt Lake City, attracts 250 million page views a month. A study says part of its success comes from reflecting the community's moral values.
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That does not mean yielding editorial control to sponsors, but it might mean coming up with alternatives to impression-based pricing, creating higher-value content for the Web by tapping into page view data, and helping to ensure that Web ads have value on their own.

In a report released on Tuesday, the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University outlines those recommendations and others, all intended to help newspapers, magazines and television stations better compete in the online marketplace.

“We’re not suggesting that journalists get marching orders from advertisers,” said Bill Grueskin, the academic dean for the journalism school and a co-author of the report. “We are suggesting that journalists get a much better understanding of why so many advertising dollars have left the traditional news media business.”

And, he added, a better understanding of what the news media can do to bring the dollars back. To have a journalism school, especially one as esteemed as Columbia’s, studying ad rate cards and the online coupon craze might seem unconventional. But it is an outgrowth of academia’s growing interest in the economic foundations of journalism at a time when those foundations appear unstable. Columbia and some other journalism schools, for instance, now offer courses on the economics of journalism.

The report’s section for conclusions opens with a quote from Randall Rothenberg, the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and a former reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Rothenberg told the report’s authors, “Here’s the problem: Journalists just don’t understand their business.”

That possibility comes up repeatedly in the report. “Many sectors of the traditional news industry have been slow to embrace changes brought on by digital technology,” it states, before recommending a “faster and more consistent pace of innovation and investment.”

It also recommends that journalists “gain a fuller appreciation for how advertisers now reach their customers via social media, new-media ads and search engine optimization,” and that larger news organizations should consider creating or re-creating separate digital staffs, “particularly on the business side.”

The report is a product of several months of visits to news organizations. Mr. Grueskin, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, co-wrote the report with Ava Seave, an adjunct professor and a consultant, and Lucas Graves, a doctoral candidate at Columbia. The journalism school will hold a public discussion about the report on Tuesday evening.

The report’s authors diagnose problems for digital media. Perhaps chief among them is that advertising on the Web tends to have less value for the consumer than advertising in other formats.

“If you ever watch somebody reading a copy of Vanity Fair, they spend as much time looking at the ads as they spend looking at the content,” Mr. Grueskin said, “because the ads are actually useful for readers.” (Ads having value on their own, he added, is “something that we as journalists have a hard time getting our heads around.”)

One of Columbia’s case studies of advertising adding value is KSL.com, the Web site of KSL, the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City. Thanks in large part to a robust classified ads service, the site now registers about 250 million page views each month — a staggeringly high figure for a local market of that size. Steep declines in classified advertising have affected countless newspapers and other news properties. But KSL.com has bucked the trend. Its classifieds section benefits from its ownership by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and from the fact that it started up before Craigslist in Salt Lake City.

But it also benefits, Mr. Grueskin said, by reflecting its community’s moral values and by forbidding anonymity. “If I were a publisher, I would spend some time looking at what KSL’s Web site does with classifieds versus what Craigslist does,” he said.

Mr. Grueskin said he was struck by a comment that Chris Hendricks, a vice president at McClatchy, made in an interview for the report:

"It’s almost like we are a sales and distribution company that decided we’re going to fund journalism." Mr. Hendricks’s local sales force sells space on sites like Yahoo as well as on McClatchy’s own sites.

The report’s authors assert that there are limits to the cost-per-thousand model of advertising pricing and say that news outlets and marketers together should “forge new models that integrate digital ads and social-media outreach.”

As an example, it cites the Web site of The Dallas Morning News, which has a section for high school sports. A package deal for advertising on the section during a recent football season included print ads, a player-of-the-week contest and a banquet for players at the end of the season. “That gets you out of the pure ‘five dollars for every thousand page views’ model,” Mr. Grueskin said.

The report’s authors take a dim view of online subscriptions to news, cautioning that news sites “now should have very limited expectations for its success — at least on the Web.”

They are more bullish on the prospects of subscriptions for mobile access. They write, “If publishers really hope to expunge the ‘original sin’ of giving away content free online, they may be best positioned to do so not on the computers where they first gave away their wares, but on mobile devices that offer a more welcoming environment.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 10, 2011, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: For Journalists, A Call to Rethink Their Online Models.

Here are three separate articles, all from Slashdot, reporting on the rapid change in what we think of as Journalism:
First Ever Pulitzer For Non-Print Series
| from the take-a-lesson-rupert dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Monday May 02, @21:58 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2349248/First-Ever-Pulitzer-For-Non-Print-Series?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
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[0]decora writes "[1]Last year ProPublica won the first Pulitzer for an
online news site. This year, they have been [2]awarded the first Pulitzer
for a series that did not appear in print. The series was Eisinger and
Bernstein's 'The Wall Street Money Machine,' which described how hedge
funds and financiers profited from the collapse of the economy.
ProPublica publishes under a [3]Creative Commons license and hosts a
[4]Nerd Blog where they write about journalism-related hacking and
publish [5]open source tools they have developed."

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2349248/First-Ever-Pulitzer-For-Non-Print-Series?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. mailto:decorat@mail.com
1. http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/13/2020227/First-Pulitzer-Awarded-To-an-Online-News-Site
2. http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/podcast-pulitzer-special-jake-bernstein-and-jesse-eisinger/
3. http://www.propublica.org/about/steal-our-stories
4. http://www.propublica.org/nerds
5. http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/timelinesetter-easy-timelines-from-spreadsheets-now-open-to-allThe Internet's New Alternate Reality
| from the it's-true-i-read-it-on-the-interweb dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Tuesday May 03, @05:11 (The Internet)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/024252/The-Internets-New-Alternate-Reality?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]Hugh Pickens writes "Tim Rutten writes in the LA Times that when
President Obama released his long form birth certificate last week, one
of the striking things about the reaction to the president's calm and —
to reasonable minds — entirely persuasive appearance in the White House
briefing room Wednesday was the rapidity and ease with which so many
leading birthers rejected the evidence he presented. 'Until very
recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined
a charge and found it baseless, it was — for all intents and purposes —
dropped,' writes Rutten. 'Today, the growth of the Internet has
[1]drained the noun "news" of its former authority. If you don't like the
facts presented on the sites of established news organizations, you
simply keep clicking until you find one whose "facts" accord with your
beliefs.'"

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/024252/The-Internets-New-Alternate-Reality?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0430-rutten-20110430,0,6735231.columnBin Laden's Death Causes Twitter Record
| from the almost-nothing-of-value dept.
| posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 03, @08:49 (Twitter)
| https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/1240253/Bin-Ladens-Death-Causes-Twitter-Record?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]gabbo529 writes "Twitter has been a source of breaking news since its
inception five years ago, and the social network was used at a high rate
last night with the death of Osama Bin Laden. [Sunday night] saw the
[1]highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 p.m. to 2:20 a.m.
ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second."

Discuss this story at:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/03/1240253/Bin-Ladens-Death-Causes-Twitter-Record?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. mailto:g.perna@ibtimes.com
1. http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/140411/20110502/twitter-osama-bin-laden-twitter-record.htm

And again from the New York Times another very slanted Head Line:

- ON THIS DAY -
On April 30, 1975, the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces.
See This Front Page
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/on-this-day/April-30?th=&emc=tha213&nl=todaysheadlines
Buy This Front Page
http://www.nytstore.com/Front-Page-New-York-Times-Reprint_p_103.html
"Fell to Communist Forces"?? Well most people in the world at the time saw it from the other side of the line. Vietnamese capital of Saigon Liberated by Vietnamese forces.
The following are much funnier and thus slightly suspect as real headlines, however, you get the idea:

Proofreading is a dying art, wouldn't you say?
Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter
This one I caught in the SGV Tribune the other day and called the Editorial Room and asked who wrote this. It took two or three readings before the editor realized that what he was reading was impossible!!! They put in a correction the next day.
I just couldn't help but send this along. Too funny...
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
No crap, really? Ya think?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers



Now that's taking things a bit far!
----------------------------------------------------------- Panda Mating Fails; VeterinarianTakes Over
What a guy!
---------------------------------------------------------------
Miners Refuse to Work after Death
No-good-for-nothing' lazy so-and-so's!
------------------------------------------------------
Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
See if that works any better than a fair trial!
----------------------------------------------------------
War Dims Hope for Peace
I can see where it might have that effect!
----------------------------------------------------------------
If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile
Ya think?!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
Who would have thought!
----------------------------------------------------------------
Enfield (London ) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
They may be on to something!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
You mean there's something stronger than duct tape?
----------------------------------------------------------
Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge
He probably IS the battery charge!
----------------------------------------------
New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
Weren't they fat enough?!
-----------------------------------------------
Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
That's what he gets for eating those beans!
---------------- ---------------------------------
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
Do they taste like chicken?
******************************
Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
Chainsaw Massacre all over again!
*************************************************** Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
Boy, are they tall!
*******************************************
And the winner is....
Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
Did I read that right?
***************************************************

Here is a very good example of a bad headline. Headlines should catch your attention but also describe as best they can,accurately, what the story is about.
- TECHNOLOGY -
PC Sales Off, Games Buoy Microsoft
A slowdown in personal computer sales at Microsoft was
overshadowed by strong sales of its Kinect and Xbox video
game products.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/technology/29microsoft.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26
As you can see 'a slowdown in personal computer sales at Microsoft' leads. Microsoft does not sell computers, so a slow down of zero is how many sales?? Thinking should be involved in headline writing as well as writing the story itself.

The news as you see it:Filtering the Social Web to Present News Items
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Published: April 24, 2011

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SAN FRANCISCO — News events as varied as the commercial jet landing in the Hudson River and the uprisings in Egypt have demonstrated that people armed with cellphones — not professional reporters — are often the first source of breaking news, uploading Twitter posts, photos and video to the Web. But the result can leave people drowning in too much information.
Enlarge This Image
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Burt Herman, left, and Xavier Damman, the founders of Storify, which opens Monday.

A Web start-up named Storify, which opens to the public Monday, aims to help journalists and others collect and filter all this information.

Using the Storify Web site, people can find and piece together publicly available content from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and other sites. They can also add text and embed the resulting collages of content on their own sites. During a private test period, reporters from The Washington Post, NPR, PBS and other outlets used the service.

Storify, based in San Francisco, is one of several Web start-ups — including Storyful, Tumblr and Color — that are developing ways to help journalists and others sift through the explosion of online content and publish the most relevant information. Investors are also betting there is a market for filtering the social Web for high-quality posts. Khosla Ventures has invested $2 million in Storify.

Even though journalists may not be the first on the scene, they select the most reliable sources, digest loads of information and provide context for events, said Burt Herman, a founder of Storify and a longtime Associated Press reporter.

“We have so many real-time streams now, we’re all drowning,” Mr. Herman said. “So the idea of Storify is to pick out the most important pieces, amplify them and give them context.”

Al Jazeera English introduced a talk show, “The Stream,” which appeared online last week and will be televised in May, that collects perspectives from social media using Storify. A recent item on the fear of Islam in the United States, for instance, included YouTube videos, Twitter posts and paragraphs from essays on Web sites and blogs.

“Storify is essentially our script,” said Ahmed Shihab Eldin, a producer and host of “The Stream.” “We knew we basically needed to capitalize on the reality that the industry is facing, which is that we no longer have exclusivity on sharing and publishing information.”

Andy Carvin, NPR’s one-man encyclopedia on Twitter for the uprisings across the Middle East and northern Africa, first used Storify to cover the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, when he realized that the reaction to the event was a story itself.

“It quickly evolved into looking at how people were discussing the media coverage surrounding it and its potential political impact,” said Mr. Carvin, senior strategist on NPR’s social media desk. “There’s a big need for tools that allow people to collect bits of social media context and organize them in some fashion.”

The tools will remain free, but Storify will consider selling ads or charging brands to use the service, said Xavier Damman, a Storify founder. Levi’s and Samsung have already used it for marketing campaigns.

Mr. Herman started Storify with Mr. Damman, who is an engineer. Mr. Herman also founded Hacks/Hackers, a group for journalists and engineers with chapters worldwide.

“We’re really trying to put together computer science plus storytelling and journalism to think creatively about how you can blend the two worlds,” he said.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 25, 2011, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Filtering the Social Web To Present News Items.

Your So Shallow:
This is an excerpt from an interview with a great designer talking about what kind of an education designers should have and he then relates that to journalism.
Q-How should universities change?

A-The first thing to do is ask: "What is the purpose of all the technology we are developing?" And the answer is, obviously: "To help people." But the understanding of "people" is in a different school—the social sciences—than the school where the understanding of technologies are taught. Right now, people in one area don't understand what someone else in their own department does, let alone what is being done in other departments.

If you want to be broad, you have to be shallow. In fact, you are shallow, because that's what journalists are: very broad, and therefore of necessity, relatively shallow in any area.

Thank you.

Here is a very good idea. Where anybody can evaluate and publish the evaluation of reporting. Check out Journalism Wall of Shame at >http://jpquake.wikispaces.com/Journalist+Wall+of+Shame
Scroll down to the evaluations and the review chart. Nicely done.

A very nice double piece from Slate in fictional journalism;Numbers Are Hard To Come By
What journalists write when they encounter a known unknown.
By Jack ShaferPosted Friday, Nov. 5, 2010, at 5:02 PM ET

In 2002, while speaking to reporters, Zen master Donald H. Rumsfeld noted that we are bedeviled by "known unknowns."

Master Rumsfeld wasn't talking about the exasperating job of journalism. He was riffing off of a pressman's question about Iraq's willingness to supply terrorists with chemical and biological weapons. But he could have been talking about the work reporters do. Every day, they bruise their brains on known unknowns—news tips, hunches, half-formed story ideas, scraps of information, and soft rumblings in the distance—in hopes of converting them into solid news stories, or what Rumsfeld calls "known knowns."
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But because reporters have only 24 hours a day to perform their labors, they frequently rely on a fudge factor to mask their failure to transform a known unknown into a known known. They employ the catchphrase, "While accurate numbers are hard to come by. …"

Reporters so depend on this phrase that if you type it—or a variant of it, such as "precise numbers are hard to find"—into Nexis, your computer will catch fire. At the very least, your Nexis screen will beg you to refine your search terms to reduce the returns from the many thousands to the hundreds.
Related in Slate
In 2006, Jack Shafer looked at the estimates of how many words H.L. Mencken wrote in his career. In 2010, he asked Tim Shriver to get off Rahm Emanuel's case for using the word retard as a pejorative.

Not every journalist who uses the phrase should be shot. For example, a reporter has my blessing to use it when he needs to acknowledge that the precise number of illegal immigrants is not known because, after all, illegal immigrants refuse to sit still for a census. Likewise, a story about the size of the historical cinema box office can get away with using it because accurate records weren't kept in the old days. But even then, he should say, "The numbers haven't been tabulated" instead of they're "hard to find," because "hard to find" implies that if he had only looked harder, he would have found them.
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But these are the exceptions. Usually when a journalist drops the phrase into his story it's because 1) he couldn't be bothered to find the number; 2) nobody has tabulated the number because nobody cares, and if the reporter writes that, he'll undermine the thesis of his piece; or 3) the story's editor insisted at the 11th hour on a number and the fudge phrase was the only thing that could be plugged into the hole.

Numbers are hard to come by pops up in lots of bogus trend stories, that genre of journalistic fraud that I've savaged repeatedly in this column. In bogus trend pieces, the phrase is almost a "tell," signaling that the publication knows that it's guilty of trying to document something as a trend when only the loosest anecdotal evidence exists to support the idea. In nonbogus trend stories, journalists use the phrase to caulk over gaps in their reporting.

Among the things whose enumeration was too difficult to pin down in 2010 were wood-fired hot-tub sales figures (New York Times, Oct. 21), the global sales of video games (New York Times, Sept. 20), dollars spent on tailgate parties (Kansas City Star, Sept. 25), the number of golfers on high-school teams (Boston Globe, April 15), the size of Brazil's acai export market (New York Times, Feb. 24), and the number of 3-D cinema screens (USA Today, Feb. 2).

Going back to 2009, the press used the dodge while discussing the number of flip-flop sandals produced (International Herald Tribune, Dec. 9); the size of the e-book reader business (New York Times, Oct. 7); sales of Nancy Drew books (New York Times, July 19); the cost of building transmission lines for wind farms east of the Rockies (Chicago Tribune, May 5); the size of Hispanic representation in corporate boardrooms, senior management, and economic-development organizations (Plain Dealer, April 19); the number of fishermen who have left the occupation (USA Today, April 9); and the number of coffee-shop employees nationally (Boston Globe, Jan. 22).

And in 2008, it was used to couch the known unknown-ness of the declining costs of solar energy systems (New York Times, Oct. 5), the number of gelato shops in the United States (New York Times, Sept. 4), the national sales figures for gelato (Dallas Morning News, July 19), and the annual number of boogie-board and surfing accidents (Virginian-Pilot, Aug. 12).

For the purpose of an elegant finish to this piece, I wish that Nexis had revealed me as one of the guilty so I could humbly attack myself. I'm not so lucky. A handful of my Slate colleagues, however, lapsed in that direction. I am as filled with forgiveness for them as I am with relief for myself.

As journalistic ills go, this one is no cancer, but it's often a symptom of journalists who chased a story and didn't catch it.Numbers Are Hard To Come By, Part 2
More about what journalists write when they encounter known unknowns.
By Jack ShaferPosted Thursday, March 24, 2011, at 6:56 PM ET

Numbers Illustration.Everybody cuts corners. Take me, for example. Today I could be writing a critique of the Libyan war coverage. I could be assessing the disaster reporting from Japan or essaying on the difficulties of getting the Syrian uprising story.

But instead of doing anything ambitious or worthy of your time, I'm going to rewrite (I mean update!) a piece I wrote in November, "Numbers Are Hard To Come By."

On the chance that you missed that piece, it's about how news outlets habitually cut corners in their reporting when they can't find solid data that support their theses but still want to run the story. They grab the nearest available—or most frequently repeated figure—and couch it with the phrase "numbers are hard to come by."
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This sort of number-fudging would be praise-worthy if the next sentence out of reporters' word processors was "And because there are no good numbers, we won't bother to generalize on the topic." But I've yet to see a reporter do this, if only because it's too easy to build an audience-pleasing story on soft numbers.

If numbers are so squishy that they require this sort of disclaimer, journalists shouldn't cite them at all. Or, if they insist, the disclaimer should read, "We have no idea what the hell we are talking about." Almost anything would better prepare news consumers for the dollop of dung they're about to be served.

One of the reasons that so many numbers are, as they say, hard to come by is that in so many cases, nobody has the necessary incentive to properly tabulate them. (If this topic makes your bunnies hop, read Max Singer's "The Vitality of Mythical Numbers," Public Interest, Spring 1971; and Peter Reuter's splendid companion piece, "The (Continued) Vitality of Mythical Numbers," Public Interest, Spring 1984.)
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I have no confidence that my ridicule will break the bad habits of my colleagues at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and other outlets. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't indulge one of my own bad habits of squeezing out easy sequels to previous columns.

So here goes—the recent things in news for which the numbers are hard to come by:

—The number of Japanese elderly living in evacuation centers (believed by some aid workers to be in the majority); Thomson Reuter AlertNet, March 22, 2011

—The number of kidnappings in Mexico ("believed to be in the thousands"), Bakersfield Californian, March 21, 2011

—The number of birds killed by feral cats in Stratford, Ontario (across Canada "untold millions"), Beacon Herald, March 19, 2011

—The number of Christians in Iraq ("as few as 150,000"), Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), March 16, 2011

—The number of Frenchmen living in London ("up to 400,000"), the Economist, March 24, 2011

—The number of guests caught bringing drugs onto cruise ships (one cruise line says 127 last year out of a million-plus), AOL Travel News, Feb. 17, 2011

—The number of sexual crimes involving teachers and students, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 16, 2011

—The number of former homeowners who lost a house to foreclosure or a short sale and have become renters (a "majority"), Contra Costa Times, Feb. 10, 2011

—The number of Down syndrome married couples (one source says it's on the rise), Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 10, 2011

—Number of science fairs (on the local level, one source says, "it's on the decline"), New York Times, Feb. 4, 2011

—Number of microcredit clients ("over 600 million"), Atlantic online, Jan. 28, 2011

—Number of threats against members of Congress ("Many members of Congress feel threats against them have increased in recent times"), Wall Street Journal, Jan. 9, 2011

—Number of video porn companies that have "retrenched or disappeared" (no estimate offered), Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jan. 8, 2011

—Numbers of Christians who have left Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine (yes, the copy says "Palestine") in the last 20 years ("hundreds of thousands"), Channel 4 News, U.K., Dec. 21, 2010

—Number of rescissions ("Consumer and industry lawyers said rescissions have risen"), Bloomberg News, Dec. 16, 2011,

—Number of e-books sold (no number estimated), Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 2010

The diplomatic cables liberated by WikiLeaks prove that journalists aren't the only ones dispensing hard-to-come-by fudge. In this cable, the State Department writes that numbers describing Russian arms sales to China and India "are hard to come by." But they're also said to be "growing."

***

Hard To Come By would be a great title for a porn video. Send mildly salacious porn titles based on the news (no hard-core!) to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. Just so you know, my Twitter feed is G-rated. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Related in Slate
"Numbers are hard to come by" stories are a subset of bogus trend stories, a pet peeve of Jack Shafer's. Last year, Shafer pummeled the numbers-are-hard-to-come-by genre. In 2006, he documented the ongoing vitality of mythical numbers.

May this is right but don't really think so:
- TECHNOLOGY -
Times's Online Pay Model Was Years in the
Making
The New York Times's online pay model, which takes effect
on March 28, may be the most watched experiment in American
journalism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/business/media/21times.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26

Thanks to Markus Leach for the following information:
Reactor 3 is MOX and run on plutonium oxide-not good.


For all who have been looking for realtime radiation data from Japan, you are in luck. Or maybe not, as the data unfortunately indicates nothing good. The System for Prediction of Environment Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) releases gamma radiation data online. The site is jittery and apparently not suited for major traffic which is why we represent several screen captures of the data. While it is not surprising that according to the website both Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures are entirely "Under Survey" as it makes sense that the government does not want to generate panic, SPEEDI has disclosed some tell-tale data about cities in Ibaraki prefecture, which is just a hundred or so miles north of Tokyo, and is just south of the ill-fated Fukushima prefecture. And the data is stunning: based on a N, NE and NNE wind direction (where it originates), meaning all coming from Fukushima, with a normal reading in the 80 nGy/h range, the city of Kounosu Naka is at 3,024, Kadobe Naka is at 2,416, Isobe Hitachioota is at 1,213 and many others are in the mid to upper triple digit range! Again, this is based on wind coming out of Fukushima and ultimately headed toward the capital. Indicatively, normal terrestrial plus cosmic gamma radiation is about 80 nGy/h.
Below we present screencaptures as of moments ago, as apparently the Japanese government seems to believe that abnormal gamma radiation levels are perfectly notmal:
A map of all prefectures, showing maximum gamma radation readings. Note Ibaraki at 3,024 nGy/h, and Kanagawa right below it (and downwind) at 224 nGy/h compared to low double digts for all other prefecture.

Not surprisingly, Fukushima is completely N/A, as every single reading is Under Survey, also known as censored.

But the stunner is Ibaraki. We will let this one speak for itself:

As a reference, based on background radiation measurements in the lower atmosphere at different altitudes above sea level up to 1100 m and over the land were made at a temperate latitude (40°) in the Thessaloniki region, North Greece, before and after the Chernobyl accident (26 April 1986), using a portable γ-ray scintillation detector and a Cutie-pie survey meter with an ionization chamber, the average value of the total background radiation at ground level was 87 nGy h-1(10.0 μR h-1, 25 cps), i.e. 60% from terrestrial radiation,55 nGy h-1 (6.3 μR h-1, 15 cps) and 40% from cosmic radiation, 32 nGy h-1 (3.7 μR h-1, 10 cps), before the Chernobyl accident, while, after it, the total background radiation was doubled, due to the long-lived radioactive fallout suspended in the atmosphere and or deposited onto the ground.

As all good journalism should:Former MI6 Chief Credits WikiLeaks With Helping Spark Revolutions
| from the powder-kegs-need-not-apply dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Tuesday March 08, @00:02 (Censorship)
| https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/03/08/0339232/Former-MI6-Chief-Credits-WikiLeaks-With-Helping-Spark-Revolutions?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]EnergyScholar writes "Sir Richard Dearlove, former Intelligence Chief
of MI6, [1]credits WikiLeaks with helping spark revolutions in the Middle
East, in (what was supposed to be) an off-the-record speech. 'I would
definitely draw parallels at the moment between the wave of political
unrest which is sweeping through the Middle East in a very exciting and
rather extraordinary fashion and also the WikiLeaks phenomenon. Really,
what ties these two events together, and of course a number of other
events, is the diffusion of power, away from the states and the
empowerment of individuals, and small groups of individuals, by
technology,' he said."

Discuss this story at:
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/03/08/0339232/Former-MI6-Chief-Credits-WikiLeaks-With-Helping-Spark-Revolutions?from=newsletter#commentlisting

Links:
0. mailto:energyscholar@gmail.com
1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/04/mi6_dearlove_wikileaks/

Well, there you go - Extremists Are Suspected in Killing of Pakistani
Minister
The minister of minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian, was
ambushed in an attack similar to the recent killing of
another liberal politician.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/world/asia/03pakistan.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

Head line writing shouldn't be insipid like the above..why couldn't it say Moderates Are.. or His Mother in law is... and probably the best would be the truth that..There Are No Suspected...

Ridge Meadows Photography{BLOG}: baby Jax and family |Maple Ridge newborn photography

Ridge Meadows Photography{BLOG}: baby Jax and family |Maple Ridge newborn photographyHere are some great pictures of a new member of a family of hero's

The Economist Style Guide'

http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/06/16/the-economist-style-guide/

The Economist is rightly renowned for the
clarity of its house style. They have an
online service offering advice on good
writing practice.

It includes tips on how to avoid common
errors and solecisms, and an online quiz to
test your writing skills.

http://www.economist.co.uk/research/StyleGuide/

If you want the complete style guide in book
form, have look at the details here -

http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/06/16/the-economist-style-guide/

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Fox News Brings Video Game Violence Debate To a New Low
| from the unpredictable-like-the-tides dept.
| posted by Soulskill on Thursday February 10, @06:09 (First Person Shooters (Games))
| https://games.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/0534237/Fox-News-Brings-Video-Game-Violence-Debate-To-a-New-Low?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fox News took another shot at the video game violence debate earlier this
week when they asked whether Bulletstorm, an upcoming M-rated shooter
from Epic Games, is [0]the worst game in the world. The article links
violent games with an increase in rapes, and suggests there should be
greater penalties for selling to minors. Gaming website Rock, Paper,
Shotgun [1]breaks down the problems with the article's sensationalist
claims and [2]highlights the disingenuous cherry-picking of quotes.
"Scott Steinberg, CEO of TechSavvy Global, and all-round industry guru,
got in touch with me to show me the answers he submitted to Fox when they
approached him for comment. [3]The full answers are reproduced below,
because what results is a fantastic interview on the subject of adult
game content and regulation. Fox chose to use none of Steinberg’s
comments in their final piece, opting instead for the more sensational
claims of those with no expertise in the subject (neither of whom have
found time to reply to our emails). But seeing these answers also
provides further insight into how the mainstream media coverage of gaming
stories works. Far from being a reporter ignorant of the subject and
twisted by naive contributors, Fox correspondent John Brandon was
equipped with a wealth of factual information and informed opinion before
composing his frantic article."

Discuss this story at:
https://games.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/0534237/Fox-News-Brings-Video-Game-Violence-Debate-To-a-New-Low?from=newsletter#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/08/bulletstorm-worst-game-kids/
1. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/09/will-bulletstorm-murder-your-children-no/
2. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/09/churnalism-fox-news-selective-quoting/
3. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/10/the-fox-news-debacle-techsavvy-update/

Here we go again and from the New York Times with the question of telling, talking, showing what you see and hear..is it a community service and or is it journalism?

Gerritsen Beach Journal
Not Quite a Reporter, but Raking Muck and Reaping Wrath
By TIM STELLOH
Published: January 23, 2011

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o

Daniel Cavanagh was nervous.
Enlarge This Image
Daniel Barry for The New York Times

Daniel Cavanagh, 26, writes a blog that draws attention to local matters, whether positive or not.

He paced the living room of his duplex apartment collecting his things: a large digital camera, an iPhone, a black leather jacket.

“I’m about to get crushed,” he said, running his hands through his hair.

Then Mr. Cavanagh, 26, drove the three blocks to St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church — the meeting place of the Gerritsen Beach Property Owners Association. It was early this month, and it was the first time Mr. Cavanagh had been back to the church’s large meeting room since November, when his simmering relationship with the small, isolated neighborhood in South Brooklyn had exploded.

His blog, GerritsenBeach.net, was at the center of the controversy. The day after Halloween, Mr. Cavanagh posted photos from the day before, of adolescents throwing rocks, potatoes and other things at cars, buses and people.

In the church’s packed basement a few days later, enraged neighbors told Mr. Cavanagh that he was “destroying” the neighborhood — that if he did not like the Beach, he should leave.

Soon after, someone threw a pumpkin at the home of Mr. Cavanagh’s father. His girlfriend’s car was scratched with a key. A man waited to confront Mr. Cavanagh outside a neighborhood bar, but a bouncer stepped in.

“I was definitely the messenger,” Mr. Cavanagh said, “and they were shooting the messenger.”

But he is a new kind of messenger. Mr. Cavanagh, a computer consultant who was born and raised in Gerritsen Beach, started his blog in 2006 because his neighborhood — population about 5,000 — was rarely in the newspapers. So he started covering local meetings, photographing events and running to crime scenes.

Like many neighborhood bloggers, Mr. Cavanagh does not call himself a reporter, and he shrugs off the standards of the traditional news media — a fact that has, in part, led to the high-pitched debate in this small community, where there are no subway lines and where many families have lived for generations. Here, the blogosphere is seen as a creature of far-off Manhattan.

Mr. Cavanagh’s Halloween post logged more than a thousand comments — the site typically gets 900 or so page views a day — and earned him the title of “Vigilante Blogger” from Gawker.

But Mr. Cavanagh’s problems had started long before. He points to “Wood-Chip Gate” — as Gerritsen Beach residents often call it — as the moment when the battle lines were drawn.

In early 2009, Mr. Cavanagh posted a couple of blog entries and a video interview about what appeared to be a not-quite-legal dumping operation just off the neighborhood’s main street, Gerritsen Avenue, on land owned by the city’s parks department.

The posts infuriated Michael Taylor, the chairman of Gerritsen Beach Cares, or GB Cares, a local nonprofit group. The organization had a deal with a contractor who, in exchange for a place to dump wood chips, would allow GB Cares access to heavy machinery for other neighborhood projects.

But GB Cares did not have written approval from the parks department, instead relying, as it often had, on a “handshake deal,” as John Douglas, the group’s president, put it.

“The parks department,” Mr. Cavanagh recalled, “saw my story and said to GB Cares, ‘Whoa — you need written approval for anything you do on our parkland.’ That basically crippled GB Cares.”

To Mr. Taylor, the posts were attacks on GB Cares and a betrayal of the Beach’s culture of volunteerism. And he was furious that Mr. Cavanagh had not given him an opportunity to comment before the entries were posted.

To Mr. Cavanagh, the posts exposed how things had always been done at the Beach. He said he did not speak with anyone at the organization before posting the entries because Mr. Taylor had said his car “would end up in the creek” if he wrote about the project. (Mr. Taylor said he did not “remember anything like that.”)

Mr. Cavanagh’s approach has raised questions about journalistic standards in the blog age, and about Mr. Cavanagh’s reporting. He posted an interview with a dump site worker, for instance, but had not told the worker that the conversation was being taped, that he was a blogger or that he might publish the interview on his site.

“I did not identify myself as anything because I didn’t, and still don’t, classify myself really as anything,” Mr. Cavanagh said.

The views of professional journalists vary on such tactics.

“I don’t think it’s particularly fair, and I don’t think it’s a good long-term strategy,” said Jere Hester, a former editor at The Daily News and the director of the NYCity News Service, run by the City University of New York.

But Jeff Jarvis, a professor of interactive journalism at CUNY, said the rules of conventional journalism “don’t necessarily have to hold” for bloggers like Mr. Cavanagh.

“He’s just a member of the community who’s writing about his community,” he said.

It was Mr. Cavanagh’s community watchdogging on Halloween that created the most ire.

Around 3 p.m., Mr. Cavanagh said, he saw more than three dozen adolescents hurling eggs, potatoes, rocks and shaving cream cans at buses, cars, women with strollers and an elderly man.

Mr. Cavanagh called the police, but it took them more than 30 minutes to arrive. By then, the group — which he had captured on camera — had scattered.

At 8:48 the next morning, he posted “No Police Response Despite Massive Damage by Local Teens.” It included more than a dozen photos of the offending youths, along with images of public Facebook profiles. Status updates described pelting the police and breaking bus windows.

Two days later, when the property owners’ association held its monthly meeting, the audience railed against Mr. Cavanagh.

In a video of that meeting posted on the blog Sheepshead Bites, Renee Sior-Cullen — whose son had been shown on Mr. Cavanagh’s blog — said the boy was just a 12-year-old trying to impress his older brothers. Ms. Sior-Cullen also charged that what Mr. Cavanagh did with her son’s Facebook posts was criminal.

“It is illegal for a grown man to take a minor’s post and copy it and repost it,” said Ms. Sior-Cullen, who did not respond to requests for an interview.

Actually, it is legal — as long as those Facebook pages were public. But whether it is legal is not always the point, Mr. Hester, of CUNY, said.

Ethically, he said, “If you’re putting names and faces out there, you’re on shaky ground.”

Mr. Cavanagh and his defenders said little at the meeting in November, as Ms. Sior-Cullen questioned his motivation in photographing smiling children at local events — a staple at GerritsenBeach.net and at community newspapers everywhere.

When the association’s chairman, George Broadhead, asked Mr. Cavanagh if he wanted to respond to Ms. Sior-Cullen, he declined. “They were angry,” Mr. Cavanagh said recently. “Me speaking would not have solved the situation rationally.”

Right or wrong, Mr. Hester said, the outrage showed how strongly parents feel when their children are exposed in the media. In December, the property owners’ association closed its meeting to everyone but property owners. At the January meeting, Mr. Cavanagh was allowed in, but he was not permitted to take photographs, or videotape the proceeding.

Nevertheless, Mr. Cavanagh said, he would not change his Halloween coverage if he could. Nor does he have any plans to stop reporting.

“There’s no way a screaming person is going to stop me,” he said.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 24, 2011, on page A22 of the New York edition.

Here is a book review from Mantex on New Media. He has it about right except for the last paragraph were he says that TV has no feedback..sites like the BBC and CBC are working hard on that one and do now have comments feedback sections were they encourage readers to comment. CBC also has a section for viewer photos and news of their own which they can post. All of this is in an attempt to answer some of the points below. It also should be noted that the two examples that I give are government news agencies, the British and Canadian respectively.
Mediactive - new book

http://www.mantex.co.uk/2010/12/27/mediactive/

Dan Gillmor is a blogger who back in 2004
launched the notion of the 'citizen journalist'.
Since that time, blogging has gone mainstream
and is even big business for a few.

This is his latest polemic in which he argues
that everyday folk have a golden opportunity
to fill the gap left by major news providers
as they slide into financial deficit.

His key point is that you no longer need
capital or a big organisation to start a
business. 'The barriers to entry are virtually
zero'.

Basically he wants us all to become more vigilant
and active participants in using the new media
tools at our disposal. And his other telling
argument is that we have two incredibly powerful
advantages over traditional journalism and the
broadcast media - these are the hyperlink and
the comment.

If television news reports an event, we have no
way of clicking through to check the source of
the information or any alternatives, and we
have no way of offering corrective feedback
or criticism.

http://www.mantex.co.uk/2010/12/27/mediactive/

Here we go again with Journalism being the spoon in the mixing bowl of democracy:Some WikiLeaks Contributions To Public Discourse
| from the greatest-hits-of-cablegate dept.
| posted by kdawson on Monday January 10, @13:07 (Government)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/01/10/1359244/Some-WikiLeaks-Contributions-To-Public-Discourse?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]Hugh Pickens writes "The EFF argues that regardless of the heated
debate over the propriety of the actions of WikiLeaks, some of the cables
have [1]contributed significantly to public and political conversations
around the world. The Guardian reported on a cable describing an incident
in Afghanistan in which employees of DynCorp, a US military contractor,
hired a 'dancing boy,' an under-aged boy dressed as a woman, who dances
for a gathering of men and is then prostituted — an incident that
contributed important information to the [2]debate over the use of
private military contractors. A cable released by WikiLeaks showed that
[3]Pfizer allegedly sought to blackmail a Nigerian regulator to stop a
lawsuit against drug trials on children. A WikiLeaks revelation that the
United States used bullying tactics to attempt to push Spain into
adopting copyright laws even more stringent than those in the US came
[4]just in time to save Spain from the kind of misguided copyright laws
that cripple innovation and facilitate online censorship. An article by
the NY Times analyzed cables released which indicated the US is [5]having
difficulties in fulfilling Obama's promise to close the Guantánamo Bay
detention camp and is now considering incentives in return for other
countries accepting detainees, including a one-on-one meeting with Obama
or assistance with the IMF. 'These examples make clear that WikiLeaks has
brought much-needed light to government operations and private actions,'
writes Rainey Reitman, 'which, while veiled in secrecy, profoundly affect
the lives of people around the world and can play an important role in a
democracy that chooses its leaders.'"

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/01/10/1359244/Some-WikiLeaks-Contributions-To-Public-Discourse?from=newsletter#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/slashdot/
1. http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/01/cablegate-disclosures-have-furthered-investigative
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/02/foreign-contractors-hired-dancing-boys
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-cables-pfizer-nigeria
4. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/how-wikileaks-killed-spains-anti-p2p-law.ars
5. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/world/americas/30gitmo.html?pagewanted=all

Can't stop the comments on the excellence of this journalism. It is the one and first break through in our time and shows what journalism's roll is in a real democracy. Beyond the reports then is the responsibility of the electorate to consider and honor the truth and then make choices.
Secrecy is the problem, not leakers
Thu, Dec 23 2010 09:46 CET byCharlie Beckett 91945 View
WikiLeaks is now at the centre of a global battle between media and those in power but what's new about what Julian Assange is doing? WikiLeaks is much more than just another journalistic scandal, it is a challenge to the way that power and news media operate in the Internet Age.

In some ways WikiLeaks is a traditional investigative news operation. It gets its information from a source and the journalists decide what they will publish. It needs a platform, an audience and revenue just like any other newsroom. It can also be sued, censored or attacked. But because it is trying to operate online outside of normal national jurisdictions it is harder to hold to account. It can use mirror sites and multiple servers to avoid physical restraint.

It also disseminates data on such a vast scale and directly to the public so it is posting a different threat to those in authority used to being able to influence if not control the media. It is independent and not run for profit and the people who work for it are ideologically motivated. This all makes it much harder to clamp down.

Oxford University Internet analyst John Naughton says that what WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. It is not that what it publishes will endanger lives or make government impossible. It is that it forces power out into the open. That is why those in power are attacking it. WikiLeaks worries them because it protects its sources and gives the evidence directly and in great detail and scale to the citizen.

It is also a challenge to mainstream media. As Columbia University digital journalism expert Emily Bell argues, it forces journalists and news organisations to demonstrate to what extent they are now part of an establishment it is their duty to report. In other words, WikiLeaks exposes the degree to which normal journalism has lost its watchdog role.

Mainstream journalism stands accused of failing to be critical enough of those in authority. Over the economic crash of 2007 and over intelligence and the Iraq war, it failed to challenge the conventional wisdom. It was not a conspiracy or a failure of resource. It was because journalism can be too responsible, balanced and passive. Sometimes journalism needs to be disruptive, critical and even partial.

No-one denies that what WikiLeaks has revealed about the Iraq war or the diplomatic cables is true. It is important because it has revealed specific abuses such as the collateral damage video of US military executing civilians. But the latest release of diplomatic communications are even more significant because they show how power works, not just what it does. It gives an insight into the values, priorities and knowledge of authority that helps us to make much better-informed judgements of what those in power actually do. Surely, that is precisely what journalism is for?

It is encouraging to see how WikiLeaks is now working with mainstream news media organisations on their latest stories. It is good that the expertise within those newsrooms can be used to help filter, explain and contextualise the raw data. It can then be presented in a way that allows for proper responses by the authorities and the public. That kind of interaction is exactly what should happen over these issues, not the knee-jerk attempt to kill the messenger.

Instead of blocking access to websites and hiding behind firewalls it would be sensible for those in power to consider a more mature and transparent relationship with their citizens.

Of course, some of these revelations may compromise safety and security. There should always be limits on free expression. Responsibility comes with rights for the journalist. However, even when it is damaging, disclosure should always be welcomed. It's why it's the First Amendment.

The danger is that we are now heading towards a future where governments from Beijing to Washington will welcome more controls on the Internet. This would then limit the power of the most liberating technology the world has seen since the invention of printing itself. It would be nave to expect those in power to embrace radical accountability. So we need to fight for transparency and embrace the opportunity that initiatives like WikiLeaks represent.

I recognise that WikiLeaks is not itself entirely transparent but I think that it is becoming more so and other better versions will follow. The real problem in the world is secrecy not leakers.

Charlie Beckett is the founding director of POLIS, the journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics and UN Global Expert. He blogs at www.charliebeckett.org and you can reach him on Twitter at @charliebeckett.

Source: Global Experts (www.theglobalexperts.org), a project of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. Copyright 2010 Global Experts/UNAOC