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

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

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

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

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

Want more, spend more

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

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

Translation: Fees or branded advertising are becoming increasingly important.

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

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

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

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

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

The people's news

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

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

He's just one example of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Programming note

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

What to do about Google stock?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheldon Rampton
Research director, Center for Media and Democracy

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

STEP 2: Log in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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








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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STEP 2: Log in.

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

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

STEP 7: Congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Japanese held over fake news site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: November 21, 2005

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

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

Howard Kurtz, left, a Washington Post reporter, questioning his own executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., over the controversy at his paper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the action is - where the money is -:


By ELIZABETH JENSEN
Published: November 14, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Cellular Life in Japan

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

By Wade Roush

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Cellular Life in Japan

Continued from Page 1

By Wade Roush

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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