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

Just a reminder for everyone that the Asahi Newspaper Tour will be on December the 9th and we should meet at 12 noon on that day at the main gate at the university. Hope to see you all there. Clark

Here is a scholarship to study in Canada all expenses paid:
Queen’s University
Office of Admissions
Gordon Hall
Kingston, ON
K7L 3N6
THE PRINCE TAKAMADO VISITING STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP
Application Form
Queen’s University has lost a distinguished alumnus and good friend with the untimely passing of His Imperial Highness Prince Takamado (1954-2002). During his years at Queen’s, Prince Takamado embraced the opportunity to learn, eager to master the English language and understand Canadian culture. Upon his return to Japan, Prince Takamado strengthened his connection to Canada, becoming a patron of the Canada-Japan Society, and promoting business and cultural links between Canada and Japan. In 1992, Queen’s University awarded His Imperial Highness an honorary degree, in recognition of his major contribution to the mutual understanding and appreciation of the cultures of the peoples of Japan and Canada.
The Prince Takamado Visiting Student Scholarship at Queen’s University is awarded to a second or third-year student of Japanese nationality (citizen) who is currently enrolled in a Japanese university, and who will study at Queen’s University on a Letter of Permission from their home university. Application should be made to Admission Services by 25 March. Admission Services will forward all applications from qualified applicants to the Student Awards Office. Value: Variable – Generally between $25,000 and $30,000 (Canadian Dollars), this will include tuition, books and supplies, and basic living expenses (including room and board and one return economy flight home) based on guidelines established by Queen’s University. A guaranteed residence room in Harkness International Hall will be available to the recipient if he/she chooses on campus accommodations.
Queen’s University is honoured to join with the Canadian Embassy in Japan in establishing The Prince Takamado Visiting Student Scholarship at Queen’s University – a fitting tribute to a loyal alumnus who dedicated so much of his life to fostering a strong relationship between Canada and Japan.

Here is Al Gore's asssesment of the modern media:

. AL GORE'S CODE RED
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/26494/
"It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public
discourse," former U.S. Vice President Al Gore told the We Media
Conference in New York. "Something has gone basically and badly
wrong in the way America's fabled 'marketplace of ideas' now
functions." Gore cited the dominance and poor quality of television
as a main cause: "Clearly, the purpose of television news is no
longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest.
It is to 'glue eyeballs to the screen' in order to build ratings and
sell advertising. ... Just look at what's on: The Robert Blake
trial. The Laci Peterson tragedy. The Michael Jackson trial. The
Runaway Bride. The search in Aruba. The latest twist in various
celebrity couplings. ... More importantly, notice what is not on:
the global climate crisis, the nation's fiscal catastrophe, the
hollowing out of America's industrial base, and a long list of other
serious public questions that need to be addressed by the American
people." Gore, whose new business venture, Current TV, airs
"viewer-created content," also blasted television for lacking "true
interactivity."
SOURCE: AlterNet, October 6, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4057

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* Thoughts For Today -- On Journalists & Journalism (part 3)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a
distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the
truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
- Graham Greene

Journalism is organized gossip.
- Edward Eggleston

The lowest form of popular culture -- lack of information,
misinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most
people's lives -- has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary
Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
- Carl Bernstein

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one
world, and life seen in the newspapers another.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
- Marguerite Duras

Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express
them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he
has, the worse he writes.
- Karl Kraus

What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is. Nothing
prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you
from a great height.
- Ken Livingstone

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough
to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he
becomes a journalist.
- Norman Mailer

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice
what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is
a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or
loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
- Janet Malcolm

The real news is bad news.
- Marshall McLuhan

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists
could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with
the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the
truth.
- Reinhold Niebuhr

In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history:
in Britain, as an extension of conversation.
- Anthony Sampson

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600
people -- including me -- would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to
Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in
the context of professional journalism.
- Hunter S. Thompson

The facts fairly and honestly presented; truth will take care of itself.
- William Allen White

In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right
time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.
- Mark Twain

This is a very disconcerting trend in America and could have reprocussions everywere. Think about it. Does this happen here?

. STEPPING UP THE ATTACK ON GREEN ACTIVISTS
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/26077/
"A remorseless rapist in Hamilton County, Ohio is sentenced to 15
years in prison for beating and raping a 57-year-old woman," writes
Kelly Hearn. "An environmental activist in California is sentenced
to 22 years and 8 months for burning three SUVs at a car dealership
after taking precautions to harm no lives. The disparity helps
illustrates what animal rights and environmental groups say is an
expanding Orwellian attack on American environmentalism being waged
under the pretext of eco-terrorism." On CounterPunch, Jeffrey St.
Clair writes, "Armed with the bulging array of new police and
surveillance powers handed the agency in the wake of 9/11, the FBI
is now free to prowl unfettered by even the thinnest strands of
constitutional due process through the lives, email and bank
accounts of activists trying to stop chemical plants from flushing
toxins into their water. ... On FoxNews, blinking eco-terrorist
alerts have replaced Tom Ridge's color-coded threat level."
SOURCE: AlterNet, September 30, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/4038