This is good reporting and a resource for further reporting:
April 1, 2010
CONTACT: Conor Kenny 202-277-6427 or ckenny@conorkenny.net
Mary Bottari at 608-345-6806
CMD RELEASES NEW WALL STREET BAILOUT TOTAL
$4.6 TRILLION IN FEDERAL FUNDS DISBURSED
New Tally Focuses on Expansive Role of Federal Reserve
Today, the Real Economy Project of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released an assessment of the total cost to taxpayers of the Wall Street bailout. CMD concludes that multiple federal agencies have disbursed $4.6 trillion dollars in supporting the financial sector since the meltdown in 2007-2008. Of that, $2 trillion is still outstanding.
CMD's assessment demonstrates that the Federal Reserve has provided by far the bulk of the funding for the bailout in the form of loans amounting to $3.8 trillion. Little information has been disclosed about what collateral taxpayers have received in return for these loans. CMD also concludes that the bailout is far from over as the government has active programs authorized to cost up to $2.9 trillion and still has $2 trillion in outstanding investments and loans.
Learn more about the 35 programs included in our tally by visiting our Total Wall Street Bailout Cost Table, which contains links to pages on each bailout program with details including the current balance sheet for each program.
"While the Treasury Department is patting itself on the back for recouping Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds and allegedly making money off of its aid to Citigroup, our accounting shows that these programs were a relatively small portion of the federal funds that have gone out the door in support of the financial sector. Far more has been done to aid Wall Street through the back door of the Federal Reserve than through the front door of Congressional appropriations," said Mary Bottari, Director of CMD's Real Economy Project.
"The tally shows that more scrutiny needs to be given by policymakers and the media to the role of the Federal Reserve especially as the Fed has accounted for the vast majority of the bailout funds, yet provides far less disclosure and is far less directly accountable than the Treasury," said Conor Kenny, the researcher who collected the data on the bailout.
CMD has presented its work in a table that shows: funds disbursed, maximum funds that were at-risk at the height of the bailout, and actual funds still outstanding for each program. CMD is also making available a Financial Crisis Tracker, a widget for the table that can be downloaded to websites to get up-to-date numbers on the financial crisis and the bailout. The Wall Street Bailout table will be updated monthly and will be a tremendous resource for reporters and the public alike.
WALL STREET BAILOUT COST TABLE can be accessed here.
KEY FINDINGS can be accessed here.
FINANCIAL CRISIS TRACKER can be accessed here.
The Center for Media and Democracy is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, public interest organization located in Madison, Wisconsin.
Center for Media and Democracy
520 University Avenue, Suite 227
Madison, Wisconsin 53703-4929
Phone: 608-260-9713 | Fax: 608-260-9714
E-mail: editor@prwatch.org
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
What is happening here? The Headline does not seem to jive with the story:
Google Faces Fallout as China Reacts to Site Shift
By MIGUEL HELFT and MICHAEL WINES
Google's China operations came under pressure as some
content from its uncensored Hong Kong site was blocked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/technology/24google.html?th&emc=th
E.U. Court Curbs Sales by Google of Brand Names as Keywords
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: March 23, 2010
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PARIS — The European Union’s highest court on Tuesday gave Google broad latitude to sell advertising linked to trademarks like Louis Vuitton on its search engine, a practice that angers companies, which fear a loss of control over their brand names.
Legal experts said, however, that the ruling stopped short of the definitive precedent that Google and brand owners alike had sought. Instead, it contained caveats that could result in a new flurry of lawsuits over the sale of “sponsored links” generated by Google searches, the main source of the company’s $23 billion in annual revenue.
In the ruling, the European Court of Justice, in Luxembourg, said Google should be allowed to auction off brand names to a variety of advertisers, not just the owners of the trademarks. Brand owners, led by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French luxury goods company, argued that only they or authorized sites should be able to buy such trademarks.
Google already conducts such sales in the United States and some European countries, including Britain and Ireland. But elsewhere in Europe, including France, the practice has been restricted by the courts, which have favored the brand owners.
Google says that selling brand names as ad keywords to multiple bidders helps consumers because it allows them to find product reviews, sellers of second-hand goods and other information.
“Our guiding principle has always been that advertising should benefit users, and our aim is to ensure that ads are relevant and useful,” Google said.
But LVMH and two other companies whose cases were considered by the court — a matchmaking service and an online travel agency — argued that the sale of their brand names by Google misled consumers and aided operators of Web sites selling copies of well-known goods and services. So important did LVMH consider the case that it enlisted the support of the French government, which filed a brief in support of its case.
The ruling Tuesday was the highest-level decision on the issue. While Google had faced similar lawsuits in the United States, it settled some of them, and no clear precedents were established. In France, after several decisions in favor of LVMH, Google appealed to the highest French court, which in turn referred questions to the European court for clarification.
The top E.U. court said Google should not be held liable for trademark infringement if it removed ads promptly when brand owners complained about violations. But individual advertisers could be liable if ads generated by another company’s brand name were found to mislead consumers, the court said.
Advertisers “cannot, by using such keywords, arrange for Google to display ads which do not allow Internet users easily to establish from which undertaking the goods or services covered by the ad in question originate,” the court said.
Lawyers said this could strengthen brand owners’ hand in lawsuits against rivals that buy their brands as search terms.
“Advertisers using the service will now need to tread very carefully indeed,” said Mark Blair, a partner at Marks & Clerk Solicitors in London. “Today’s ruling may to an extent ring-fence Google from claims by brand owners, but it will not close the door on future litigation in this area.”
Several trademark lawsuits against users of Google’s search-ad system are already pending in Europe, including one involving the florists’ network Interflora, which sued the British retailer Marks & Spencer. That company had bought the Interflora keyword on Google as a way to promote its rival flower delivery service.
The E.U. court said Google, too, could be held liable if it were found to have encouraged trademark violations or counterfeiting.
For example, Google critics have complained about one of the company’s services, which suggests potential keywords to advertisers. LVMH said in its lawsuit that these included terms like “fake Louis Vuitton bags.”
Google Faces Fallout as China Reacts to Site Shift
By MIGUEL HELFT and MICHAEL WINES
Google's China operations came under pressure as some
content from its uncensored Hong Kong site was blocked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/technology/24google.html?th&emc=th
E.U. Court Curbs Sales by Google of Brand Names as Keywords
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: March 23, 2010
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PARIS — The European Union’s highest court on Tuesday gave Google broad latitude to sell advertising linked to trademarks like Louis Vuitton on its search engine, a practice that angers companies, which fear a loss of control over their brand names.
Legal experts said, however, that the ruling stopped short of the definitive precedent that Google and brand owners alike had sought. Instead, it contained caveats that could result in a new flurry of lawsuits over the sale of “sponsored links” generated by Google searches, the main source of the company’s $23 billion in annual revenue.
In the ruling, the European Court of Justice, in Luxembourg, said Google should be allowed to auction off brand names to a variety of advertisers, not just the owners of the trademarks. Brand owners, led by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French luxury goods company, argued that only they or authorized sites should be able to buy such trademarks.
Google already conducts such sales in the United States and some European countries, including Britain and Ireland. But elsewhere in Europe, including France, the practice has been restricted by the courts, which have favored the brand owners.
Google says that selling brand names as ad keywords to multiple bidders helps consumers because it allows them to find product reviews, sellers of second-hand goods and other information.
“Our guiding principle has always been that advertising should benefit users, and our aim is to ensure that ads are relevant and useful,” Google said.
But LVMH and two other companies whose cases were considered by the court — a matchmaking service and an online travel agency — argued that the sale of their brand names by Google misled consumers and aided operators of Web sites selling copies of well-known goods and services. So important did LVMH consider the case that it enlisted the support of the French government, which filed a brief in support of its case.
The ruling Tuesday was the highest-level decision on the issue. While Google had faced similar lawsuits in the United States, it settled some of them, and no clear precedents were established. In France, after several decisions in favor of LVMH, Google appealed to the highest French court, which in turn referred questions to the European court for clarification.
The top E.U. court said Google should not be held liable for trademark infringement if it removed ads promptly when brand owners complained about violations. But individual advertisers could be liable if ads generated by another company’s brand name were found to mislead consumers, the court said.
Advertisers “cannot, by using such keywords, arrange for Google to display ads which do not allow Internet users easily to establish from which undertaking the goods or services covered by the ad in question originate,” the court said.
Lawyers said this could strengthen brand owners’ hand in lawsuits against rivals that buy their brands as search terms.
“Advertisers using the service will now need to tread very carefully indeed,” said Mark Blair, a partner at Marks & Clerk Solicitors in London. “Today’s ruling may to an extent ring-fence Google from claims by brand owners, but it will not close the door on future litigation in this area.”
Several trademark lawsuits against users of Google’s search-ad system are already pending in Europe, including one involving the florists’ network Interflora, which sued the British retailer Marks & Spencer. That company had bought the Interflora keyword on Google as a way to promote its rival flower delivery service.
The E.U. court said Google, too, could be held liable if it were found to have encouraged trademark violations or counterfeiting.
For example, Google critics have complained about one of the company’s services, which suggests potential keywords to advertisers. LVMH said in its lawsuit that these included terms like “fake Louis Vuitton bags.”
Friday, March 12, 2010
This is what good journalism is about: Silk Parachute: Essays By John McPhee Farrar, Straus and Giroux 227 pp., $25
posted March 9, 2010 at 5:35 am EST
In dedicating his latest collection of essays, to his grandchildren, John McPhee perhaps inadvertently reminds readers of his longevity in American letters and his stature as a standard-bearer of a particular kind of literary journalism.
As a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1965, McPhee has come to define a New Yorker staple, what he calls in “Silk Parachute” the “long fact piece.” It’s typically an exhaustively researched, meticulously reported, and unapologetically lengthy article that lavishes fact upon fact, as a painter might build texture with successive layers of brush strokes, in an attempt to make an object of curiosity shimmer with fresh revelation.
McPhee’s chosen subjects often seem almost aggressively prosaic. He once wrote an entire book about oranges, and another one of his books is about shad fish. McPhee is also a longtime enthusiast of geology, a subject that doesn’t promise automatic commercial appeal.
Not everyone is a fan of McPhee’s work. Many years ago, fellow essayist Philip Lopate described it as a “scrupulously fair, sporting, impersonal fact-gathering style ... which reminds me of nothing so much as a colony of industrious termites capable of patiently reducing any subject matter to a sawdust of detail.”
What Lopate appeared to want in McPhee’s work was a more overtly personal point of view, and this is exactly what readers get in “Silk Parachute,” McPhee’s most personal book to date.
The book divides itself just about evenly between the longish reportage for which McPhee is most famous and smaller vignettes in which the first-person voice takes a starring role. The title essay is a small piece of memoir in which McPhee fondly remembers growing up with his mother. We have McPhee’s mother to thank for encouraging his love of observation, indulging his childhood wish to stand at La Guardia Field in freezing weather and watch the planes. “At LaGuardia,” McPhee recalls, “she accompanied me to the observation deck and stood there in the icy wind for at least an hour, maybe two, while I, spellbound, watched the DC-3’s coming in on final, their wings flapping in the gusts.”
During that excursion, McPhee’s mother bought him a toy parachute stuffed within a small, hinged ball. “Folded just so, the parachute never failed,” McPhee tells readers. “Always, it floated back to you – silkily, beautifully – to start over and float back again.”
The ideals evoked by that memory – beauty, balance, buoyancy – rest at the heart of McPhee’s writerly sensibility. They are well on display in “My Life List,” another deeply personal and wryly funny piece in which McPhee recounts some of the odd things he’s eaten on the road. The complete list cannot be duplicated here, but suffice it to say that bee spit, lion, porpoise, and puffin are included.
“My Life List” also offers an occasion for tongue-in-cheek portraits of McPhee’s fellow New Yorker writer Ian Frazier and the magazine’s legendary late editor William Shawn. Inspired by his long relationship with The New Yorker, “Silk Parachutes” features a good bit of shop talk, most notably in “Checkpoints,” in which McPhee chronicles the exacting and often hilarious lengths to which New Yorker fact-checkers will go to verify the accuracy of reporting. One such exercise involved phoning someone in London and dispatching him to Fitzroy Road to double-check that a blue ceramic plaque honoring William Butler Yeats was, in fact, blue and ceramic.
Another essay, “Season on the Chalk,” records a characteristic McPhee outing, using travelogue to explore the peculiar chalk geology “below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and – from Erith Reach to Gravesend – under fifteen miles of the Lower Thames.”
McPhee often proves an engaging travel writer, and he works hard to distill complex science for the layman. But geology being what it is, the subject matter requires the reader to at least meet McPhee halfway. Unless one shares McPhee’s passionate interest in the topic, sentences like this will be tough sledding: “At the Paleozoic-Mesozoic stratigraphic boundary, there is no known deposit of extraterrestrial platinum-group metals, nor is there any other form of evidence of an asteroid impact.”
“Rip Van Golfer,” another essay, takes us inside a golf tournament featuring Tiger Woods, who’s become a regular in the tabloids since McPhee wrote the piece. Woods’s personal travails, copiously followed in the blogosphere and on Twitter, point to a media culture in which McPhee’s tradition of journalism, so fastidious and fair-minded, seems suddenly old-fashioned.
How long the McPhee tradition will endure is anyone’s guess. But for now we have “Silk Parachute,” a testament to a kind of literary journalism that will, with any luck, have both its standards and at its standard-bearer around for years to come.
Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
posted March 9, 2010 at 5:35 am EST
In dedicating his latest collection of essays, to his grandchildren, John McPhee perhaps inadvertently reminds readers of his longevity in American letters and his stature as a standard-bearer of a particular kind of literary journalism.
As a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1965, McPhee has come to define a New Yorker staple, what he calls in “Silk Parachute” the “long fact piece.” It’s typically an exhaustively researched, meticulously reported, and unapologetically lengthy article that lavishes fact upon fact, as a painter might build texture with successive layers of brush strokes, in an attempt to make an object of curiosity shimmer with fresh revelation.
McPhee’s chosen subjects often seem almost aggressively prosaic. He once wrote an entire book about oranges, and another one of his books is about shad fish. McPhee is also a longtime enthusiast of geology, a subject that doesn’t promise automatic commercial appeal.
Not everyone is a fan of McPhee’s work. Many years ago, fellow essayist Philip Lopate described it as a “scrupulously fair, sporting, impersonal fact-gathering style ... which reminds me of nothing so much as a colony of industrious termites capable of patiently reducing any subject matter to a sawdust of detail.”
What Lopate appeared to want in McPhee’s work was a more overtly personal point of view, and this is exactly what readers get in “Silk Parachute,” McPhee’s most personal book to date.
The book divides itself just about evenly between the longish reportage for which McPhee is most famous and smaller vignettes in which the first-person voice takes a starring role. The title essay is a small piece of memoir in which McPhee fondly remembers growing up with his mother. We have McPhee’s mother to thank for encouraging his love of observation, indulging his childhood wish to stand at La Guardia Field in freezing weather and watch the planes. “At LaGuardia,” McPhee recalls, “she accompanied me to the observation deck and stood there in the icy wind for at least an hour, maybe two, while I, spellbound, watched the DC-3’s coming in on final, their wings flapping in the gusts.”
During that excursion, McPhee’s mother bought him a toy parachute stuffed within a small, hinged ball. “Folded just so, the parachute never failed,” McPhee tells readers. “Always, it floated back to you – silkily, beautifully – to start over and float back again.”
The ideals evoked by that memory – beauty, balance, buoyancy – rest at the heart of McPhee’s writerly sensibility. They are well on display in “My Life List,” another deeply personal and wryly funny piece in which McPhee recounts some of the odd things he’s eaten on the road. The complete list cannot be duplicated here, but suffice it to say that bee spit, lion, porpoise, and puffin are included.
“My Life List” also offers an occasion for tongue-in-cheek portraits of McPhee’s fellow New Yorker writer Ian Frazier and the magazine’s legendary late editor William Shawn. Inspired by his long relationship with The New Yorker, “Silk Parachutes” features a good bit of shop talk, most notably in “Checkpoints,” in which McPhee chronicles the exacting and often hilarious lengths to which New Yorker fact-checkers will go to verify the accuracy of reporting. One such exercise involved phoning someone in London and dispatching him to Fitzroy Road to double-check that a blue ceramic plaque honoring William Butler Yeats was, in fact, blue and ceramic.
Another essay, “Season on the Chalk,” records a characteristic McPhee outing, using travelogue to explore the peculiar chalk geology “below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and – from Erith Reach to Gravesend – under fifteen miles of the Lower Thames.”
McPhee often proves an engaging travel writer, and he works hard to distill complex science for the layman. But geology being what it is, the subject matter requires the reader to at least meet McPhee halfway. Unless one shares McPhee’s passionate interest in the topic, sentences like this will be tough sledding: “At the Paleozoic-Mesozoic stratigraphic boundary, there is no known deposit of extraterrestrial platinum-group metals, nor is there any other form of evidence of an asteroid impact.”
“Rip Van Golfer,” another essay, takes us inside a golf tournament featuring Tiger Woods, who’s become a regular in the tabloids since McPhee wrote the piece. Woods’s personal travails, copiously followed in the blogosphere and on Twitter, point to a media culture in which McPhee’s tradition of journalism, so fastidious and fair-minded, seems suddenly old-fashioned.
How long the McPhee tradition will endure is anyone’s guess. But for now we have “Silk Parachute,” a testament to a kind of literary journalism that will, with any luck, have both its standards and at its standard-bearer around for years to come.
Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Friday, January 08, 2010
This is a special feature section of the New York Times and is an example of the very best in present day photo journalism. Writing skill aren't always needed. Passion, sympathy, empathy are all great things for a journalist to have. Maybe essential.
January 8, 2010, 12:01 AM
Showcase: No Relief and Little Attention
By AMBER BENHAM
Sexual violence, civilian casualties, child soldiers, wounded refugees and malnutrition — there is no shortage of suffering in Congo.
And that is what engaged the attention of Cédric Gerbehaye, 32, who left journalism school with some basic photography skills, determined to pursue conflicts like the brutal fighting among militias and the Congolese army, which has been going on more than a decade with little interest from Western journalists.
He was selected in 2007 as one of 12 promising young photojournalists to participate in the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. The contest theme was fragility. He set out to show the human consequences of the failed peace process in eastern Congo. The nonprofit organization Aviation Sans Frontières, which offers humanitarian aid, allowed him to join flights — in a small Cessna — into rebel zones and camps for internally displaced persons in the provinces of Ituri and North Kivu. He spent two months photographing the people whose lives had been devastated, as well as rebels and soldiers — adults and children.
On two subsequent trips over the next year, Mr. Gerbehaye tagged along with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), traveling to hospitals and remote areas where displaced people, sick and wounded, sought help. The photos he took — many of them portraits — focus on victims rather than violence.
“I’m not looking for the combat,” he said. “I’m interested in trying to tell the story of the people.”
Mr. Gerbehaye worked with Doctors Without Borders to create a multimedia feature, “Condition: Critical, Voices From the War in Eastern Congo,” which combines his photos with video segments and audio interviews by staff members of the aid organization.
He considers himself a journalist first, then a photographer. He uses black-and-white film, rather than a digital card, to capture the grainy, imperfect reality around him.
As a young photojournalist, he was deeply affected by images of the Vietnam War and, more recently, of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He doesn’t consider himself a conflict photographer. He prefers the term “concerned photographer.” His work is focused on using images to bring issues that have been overlooked by the media — often violent conflicts — out into the open, “so that people cannot just hide.”
“If there is only a slight possibility that it has an impact, it’s my duty to do it,” Mr. Gerbehaye said. “So that people cannot say, ‘We didn’t know, we had no clue.’”
Other Lens posts have focused on the efforts of photographers to draw attention to the devastating conditions in Congo. “Behind the Scenes: Suffering Writ Large” (Oct. 19, 2009) concerned an exhibit at the United Nations showing victims of sexual violence. “Showcase: Uneasy Congo” (Sept. 1, 2009) highlighted the work of Dominic Nahr.
January 8, 2010, 12:01 AM
Showcase: No Relief and Little Attention
By AMBER BENHAM
Sexual violence, civilian casualties, child soldiers, wounded refugees and malnutrition — there is no shortage of suffering in Congo.
And that is what engaged the attention of Cédric Gerbehaye, 32, who left journalism school with some basic photography skills, determined to pursue conflicts like the brutal fighting among militias and the Congolese army, which has been going on more than a decade with little interest from Western journalists.
He was selected in 2007 as one of 12 promising young photojournalists to participate in the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. The contest theme was fragility. He set out to show the human consequences of the failed peace process in eastern Congo. The nonprofit organization Aviation Sans Frontières, which offers humanitarian aid, allowed him to join flights — in a small Cessna — into rebel zones and camps for internally displaced persons in the provinces of Ituri and North Kivu. He spent two months photographing the people whose lives had been devastated, as well as rebels and soldiers — adults and children.
On two subsequent trips over the next year, Mr. Gerbehaye tagged along with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), traveling to hospitals and remote areas where displaced people, sick and wounded, sought help. The photos he took — many of them portraits — focus on victims rather than violence.
“I’m not looking for the combat,” he said. “I’m interested in trying to tell the story of the people.”
Mr. Gerbehaye worked with Doctors Without Borders to create a multimedia feature, “Condition: Critical, Voices From the War in Eastern Congo,” which combines his photos with video segments and audio interviews by staff members of the aid organization.
He considers himself a journalist first, then a photographer. He uses black-and-white film, rather than a digital card, to capture the grainy, imperfect reality around him.
As a young photojournalist, he was deeply affected by images of the Vietnam War and, more recently, of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He doesn’t consider himself a conflict photographer. He prefers the term “concerned photographer.” His work is focused on using images to bring issues that have been overlooked by the media — often violent conflicts — out into the open, “so that people cannot just hide.”
“If there is only a slight possibility that it has an impact, it’s my duty to do it,” Mr. Gerbehaye said. “So that people cannot say, ‘We didn’t know, we had no clue.’”
Other Lens posts have focused on the efforts of photographers to draw attention to the devastating conditions in Congo. “Behind the Scenes: Suffering Writ Large” (Oct. 19, 2009) concerned an exhibit at the United Nations showing victims of sexual violence. “Showcase: Uneasy Congo” (Sept. 1, 2009) highlighted the work of Dominic Nahr.
Monday, January 04, 2010
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Here is a real story about Japan. The foreign press is very interested in stories coming from Japan as they see it as cutting edge, or predicting the future of their own societies:For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk
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By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: January 1, 2010
TOKYO — For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.
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Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
Atsushi Nakanishi has condensed his possessions to two suitcases, which he stores in lockers at the capsule hotel where he lives. More Photos »
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Jobless, and Living in a Bunk
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Atsushi Nakanishi is among the jobless living in a capsule hotel, renting a bunk with no door. More Photos >
“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”
When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.
Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.
Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless.
The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless. The Democratic Party, which swept to power in September, wants to avoid the fate of the previous pro-business government, which was caught off-guard when unemployed workers pitched tents near public offices last year to call attention to their plight.
“In this bitter-cold New Year’s season, the government intends to do all it can to help those who face hardship,” Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said in a video posted Dec. 26 on YouTube. “You are not alone.”
On Friday, he visited a Tokyo shelter housing 700 homeless people, telling reporters that “help can’t wait.”
Mr. Nakanishi considers himself relatively lucky. After working odd jobs on an Isuzu assembly line, at pachinko parlors and as a security guard, Mr. Nakanishi, 40, moved into the capsule hotel in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district in April to save on rent while he worked night shifts at a delivery company.
Mr. Nakanishi, who studied economics at a regional university, dreams of becoming a lawyer and pores over legal manuals during the day. But with no job since Christmas, he does not know how much longer he can afford a capsule bed.
The rent is surprisingly high for such a small space: 59,000 yen a month, or about $640, for an upper bunk. But with no upfront deposit or extra utility charges, and basic amenities like fresh linens and free use of a communal bath and sauna, the cost is far less than renting an apartment in Tokyo, Mr. Nakanishi says.
Still, it is a bleak world where deep sleep is rare. The capsules do not have doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows.
Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks.
Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel staff does its best to put guests at ease: “Welcome home,” employees say at the entrance.
“Our main clients used to be salarymen who were out drinking and missed the last train,” said Tetsuya Akasako, head manager at the hotel.
But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month.
After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews.
At 2 a.m. on one recent December night, two young women watched the American television show “24” on a TV inside the sauna. One said she had traveled to Tokyo from her native Gunma, north of the city, to look for work. She intended to be a hostess at one of the capital’s cabaret clubs, where women engage in conversation with men for a fee.
The woman, 20, said she was hoping to land a job with a club that would put her up in an apartment. She declined to give her name because she did not want her family to know her whereabouts.
“It’s tough to live like this, but it won’t be for too long,” she said. “At least there are more jobs here than in Gunma.”
The government says about 15,800 people live on the streets in Japan, but aid groups put the figure much higher, with at least 10,000 in Tokyo alone. Those numbers do not count the city’s “hidden” homeless, like those who live in capsule hotels. There is also a floating population that sleeps overnight in the country’s many 24-hour Internet cafes and saunas.
The jobless rate, at 5.2 percent, is at a record high, and the number of households on welfare has risen sharply. The country’s 15.7 percent poverty rate is one of the highest among industrialized nations.
These statistics have helped shatter an image, held since the country’s rise as an industrial power in the 1970s, that Japan is a classless society.
“When the country enjoyed rapid economic growth, standards of living improved across the board and class differences were obscured,” said Prof. Hiroshi Ishida of the University of Tokyo. “With a stagnating economy, class is more visible again.”
The government has poured money into bolstering Japan’s social welfare system, promising cash payments to households with children and abolishing tuition fees at public high schools.
Still, Naoto Iwaya, 46, is on the verge of joining the hopeless. A former tuna fisherman, he has been living at another capsule hotel in Tokyo since August. He most recently worked on a landfill at the city’s Haneda Airport, but that job ended last month.
“I have looked and looked, but there are no jobs. Now my savings are almost gone,” Mr. Iwaya said, after checking into an emergency shelter in Tokyo. He will be allowed to stay until Monday.
After that, he said, “I don’t know where I can go.”
So, the rest of the world views this as Science Fiction, however it has been a reality here in Japan for a number of decades. What is the future going to show us? Write that story and I promise you it will be published and paid for in the New York Times. Send it to me first for editing.
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By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: January 1, 2010
TOKYO — For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.
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Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
Atsushi Nakanishi has condensed his possessions to two suitcases, which he stores in lockers at the capsule hotel where he lives. More Photos »
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Jobless, and Living in a Bunk
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Times Topics: Japan
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Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
Atsushi Nakanishi is among the jobless living in a capsule hotel, renting a bunk with no door. More Photos >
“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”
When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.
Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.
Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless.
The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless. The Democratic Party, which swept to power in September, wants to avoid the fate of the previous pro-business government, which was caught off-guard when unemployed workers pitched tents near public offices last year to call attention to their plight.
“In this bitter-cold New Year’s season, the government intends to do all it can to help those who face hardship,” Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said in a video posted Dec. 26 on YouTube. “You are not alone.”
On Friday, he visited a Tokyo shelter housing 700 homeless people, telling reporters that “help can’t wait.”
Mr. Nakanishi considers himself relatively lucky. After working odd jobs on an Isuzu assembly line, at pachinko parlors and as a security guard, Mr. Nakanishi, 40, moved into the capsule hotel in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district in April to save on rent while he worked night shifts at a delivery company.
Mr. Nakanishi, who studied economics at a regional university, dreams of becoming a lawyer and pores over legal manuals during the day. But with no job since Christmas, he does not know how much longer he can afford a capsule bed.
The rent is surprisingly high for such a small space: 59,000 yen a month, or about $640, for an upper bunk. But with no upfront deposit or extra utility charges, and basic amenities like fresh linens and free use of a communal bath and sauna, the cost is far less than renting an apartment in Tokyo, Mr. Nakanishi says.
Still, it is a bleak world where deep sleep is rare. The capsules do not have doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows.
Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks.
Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel staff does its best to put guests at ease: “Welcome home,” employees say at the entrance.
“Our main clients used to be salarymen who were out drinking and missed the last train,” said Tetsuya Akasako, head manager at the hotel.
But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month.
After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews.
At 2 a.m. on one recent December night, two young women watched the American television show “24” on a TV inside the sauna. One said she had traveled to Tokyo from her native Gunma, north of the city, to look for work. She intended to be a hostess at one of the capital’s cabaret clubs, where women engage in conversation with men for a fee.
The woman, 20, said she was hoping to land a job with a club that would put her up in an apartment. She declined to give her name because she did not want her family to know her whereabouts.
“It’s tough to live like this, but it won’t be for too long,” she said. “At least there are more jobs here than in Gunma.”
The government says about 15,800 people live on the streets in Japan, but aid groups put the figure much higher, with at least 10,000 in Tokyo alone. Those numbers do not count the city’s “hidden” homeless, like those who live in capsule hotels. There is also a floating population that sleeps overnight in the country’s many 24-hour Internet cafes and saunas.
The jobless rate, at 5.2 percent, is at a record high, and the number of households on welfare has risen sharply. The country’s 15.7 percent poverty rate is one of the highest among industrialized nations.
These statistics have helped shatter an image, held since the country’s rise as an industrial power in the 1970s, that Japan is a classless society.
“When the country enjoyed rapid economic growth, standards of living improved across the board and class differences were obscured,” said Prof. Hiroshi Ishida of the University of Tokyo. “With a stagnating economy, class is more visible again.”
The government has poured money into bolstering Japan’s social welfare system, promising cash payments to households with children and abolishing tuition fees at public high schools.
Still, Naoto Iwaya, 46, is on the verge of joining the hopeless. A former tuna fisherman, he has been living at another capsule hotel in Tokyo since August. He most recently worked on a landfill at the city’s Haneda Airport, but that job ended last month.
“I have looked and looked, but there are no jobs. Now my savings are almost gone,” Mr. Iwaya said, after checking into an emergency shelter in Tokyo. He will be allowed to stay until Monday.
After that, he said, “I don’t know where I can go.”
So, the rest of the world views this as Science Fiction, however it has been a reality here in Japan for a number of decades. What is the future going to show us? Write that story and I promise you it will be published and paid for in the New York Times. Send it to me first for editing.
Which of these three news items is the most important, and what has been missed here? What are the really important news items of this year 2010? I mean not just for you here in Japan but for everyone in the world?
- QUOTATION OF THE DAY -
"People are starting to see it like drunk driving, and that's the comparison we need to continue to make."
- STEVE FARLEY, an Arizona state representative from Tucson who in 2007
first proposed banning texting while driving.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/technology/02distracted.html?th&emc=th
..................
- WORLD --
Photographs: Between War and Peace
A fragile calm has settled in Darfur, Sudan's western region that has become synonymous with conflict.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/01/01/world/20100101DARFUR_index.html?th&emc=th
- OPINION -
The Thread: The Homeland Secretary's Job Security
Is 'the system worked' this White House's 'heckuva job, Brownie'?
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/the-homeland-secretarys-job-security/?th&emc=th
- QUOTATION OF THE DAY -
"People are starting to see it like drunk driving, and that's the comparison we need to continue to make."
- STEVE FARLEY, an Arizona state representative from Tucson who in 2007
first proposed banning texting while driving.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/technology/02distracted.html?th&emc=th
..................
- WORLD --
Photographs: Between War and Peace
A fragile calm has settled in Darfur, Sudan's western region that has become synonymous with conflict.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/01/01/world/20100101DARFUR_index.html?th&emc=th
- OPINION -
The Thread: The Homeland Secretary's Job Security
Is 'the system worked' this White House's 'heckuva job, Brownie'?
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/the-homeland-secretarys-job-security/?th&emc=th
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Here's an interesting take from Wired via Futurismic:
Homeopapes: journalism by machine
Paul Raven @ 29-12-2009
Here’s an interesting piece at Wired UK that picks up the “OMG journalism is dying” ball and runs with it in the direction of automated machine-to-machine and machine-to-person news aggregation:
NewsScope is a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven, trading. Triggered by signals detected by algorithms within vast mountains of real-time data, trading of this kind now accounts for a significant proportion of turnover in the world’s financial centres.
Reuters’ algorithms parse news stories. Then they assign “sentiment scores” to words and phrases. The company argues that its systems are able to do this “faster and more consistently than human operators”.
Millisecond by millisecond, the aim is to calculate “prevailing sentiment” surrounding specific companies, sectors, indices and markets. Untouched by human hand, these measurements of sentiment feed into the pools of raw data that trigger trading strategies.
[...]
Here and there, interesting possibilities are emerging. Earlier this year, at Northwestern University in the US, a group of computer science and journalism students rigged up a programme called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball matches.
Stats Monkey relies upon two key metrics: Game Score (which allows a computer to figure out which team members are influencing the action most significantly) and Win Probability (which analyses the state of a game at any particular moment, and calculates which side is likely to win).
Combining the two, Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated “narrative arcs” to describe the action in a format recognisable as a news story.
The resulting news stories read surprisingly well. If we assume that the underlying data is accurate, there’s little to prevent newspapers from using similar techniques to report a wide range of sporting events.
Homeopapes: journalism by machine
Paul Raven @ 29-12-2009
Here’s an interesting piece at Wired UK that picks up the “OMG journalism is dying” ball and runs with it in the direction of automated machine-to-machine and machine-to-person news aggregation:
NewsScope is a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven, trading. Triggered by signals detected by algorithms within vast mountains of real-time data, trading of this kind now accounts for a significant proportion of turnover in the world’s financial centres.
Reuters’ algorithms parse news stories. Then they assign “sentiment scores” to words and phrases. The company argues that its systems are able to do this “faster and more consistently than human operators”.
Millisecond by millisecond, the aim is to calculate “prevailing sentiment” surrounding specific companies, sectors, indices and markets. Untouched by human hand, these measurements of sentiment feed into the pools of raw data that trigger trading strategies.
[...]
Here and there, interesting possibilities are emerging. Earlier this year, at Northwestern University in the US, a group of computer science and journalism students rigged up a programme called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball matches.
Stats Monkey relies upon two key metrics: Game Score (which allows a computer to figure out which team members are influencing the action most significantly) and Win Probability (which analyses the state of a game at any particular moment, and calculates which side is likely to win).
Combining the two, Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated “narrative arcs” to describe the action in a format recognisable as a news story.
The resulting news stories read surprisingly well. If we assume that the underlying data is accurate, there’s little to prevent newspapers from using similar techniques to report a wide range of sporting events.
So what is your opinion of this:
NBC criticized for 'chequebook journalism'
Last Updated: Tuesday, December 29, 2009 | 4:27 PM ET Comments22Recommend27
The Associated Press
David Goldman, top, followed by his Sean, waves as he boards a plane at the Galeao airport, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Dec. 24. (Silvia Izquierdo/Associated Press)
A professional journalists' group is condemning NBC News for chartering a plane that carried a New Jersey man involved in a custody battle home from Brazil with his son.
The New York-based Society of Professional Journalists is calling it "chequebook journalism" and said the arrangement damages the network's credibility.
David Goldman, who successfully fought the Brazilian family of his now-deceased ex-wife for custody of nine-year-old Sean, granted an interview to Meredith Vieira of NBC's Today show that aired Monday.
NBC said Goldman was booked for Today before the network invited him on the plane.
The network had already arranged for the plane to bring its own employees back to the U.S. for Christmas, NBC News spokeswoman Lauren Kapp said. If NBC hadn't brought the Goldmans home, one of its rivals would have, she said.
"We've covered this story exceptionally well," she said. "Their going on the plane did not affect our coverage of the story or getting them booked at all."
Viewers told of payment
NBC News told viewers it had paid for the Goldmans' trip home, she said. The network showed pictures of the Goldmans on the plane and Nightly News featured a brief interview by correspondent Jeff Rossen with David Goldman while both were on the plane.
The journalists' group said NBC was paying for access, even if it was only covering the cost of a trip by plane.
"Paying for access taints the credibility and neutrality of what you are doing," said Andy Schotz, chairman of the SPJ ethics committee. "There is now a motive for people to be helping you, to be telling you what you want to hear."
Most news organizations say they don't pay for interviews. But critics say the commonly used practice of paying to license photos or video from a subject matter or paying for someone's travel is a way of getting around the restriction.
CNN and ABC paid for cellphone pictures taken by Jasper Schuringa, the man who helped subdue an alleged terrorist who tried to take down a Detroit-bound plane. Both also interviewed Schuringa but denied any connection between the payments and the interviews.
© The Canadian Press, 2009
NBC criticized for 'chequebook journalism'
Last Updated: Tuesday, December 29, 2009 | 4:27 PM ET Comments22Recommend27
The Associated Press
David Goldman, top, followed by his Sean, waves as he boards a plane at the Galeao airport, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Dec. 24. (Silvia Izquierdo/Associated Press)
A professional journalists' group is condemning NBC News for chartering a plane that carried a New Jersey man involved in a custody battle home from Brazil with his son.
The New York-based Society of Professional Journalists is calling it "chequebook journalism" and said the arrangement damages the network's credibility.
David Goldman, who successfully fought the Brazilian family of his now-deceased ex-wife for custody of nine-year-old Sean, granted an interview to Meredith Vieira of NBC's Today show that aired Monday.
NBC said Goldman was booked for Today before the network invited him on the plane.
The network had already arranged for the plane to bring its own employees back to the U.S. for Christmas, NBC News spokeswoman Lauren Kapp said. If NBC hadn't brought the Goldmans home, one of its rivals would have, she said.
"We've covered this story exceptionally well," she said. "Their going on the plane did not affect our coverage of the story or getting them booked at all."
Viewers told of payment
NBC News told viewers it had paid for the Goldmans' trip home, she said. The network showed pictures of the Goldmans on the plane and Nightly News featured a brief interview by correspondent Jeff Rossen with David Goldman while both were on the plane.
The journalists' group said NBC was paying for access, even if it was only covering the cost of a trip by plane.
"Paying for access taints the credibility and neutrality of what you are doing," said Andy Schotz, chairman of the SPJ ethics committee. "There is now a motive for people to be helping you, to be telling you what you want to hear."
Most news organizations say they don't pay for interviews. But critics say the commonly used practice of paying to license photos or video from a subject matter or paying for someone's travel is a way of getting around the restriction.
CNN and ABC paid for cellphone pictures taken by Jasper Schuringa, the man who helped subdue an alleged terrorist who tried to take down a Detroit-bound plane. Both also interviewed Schuringa but denied any connection between the payments and the interviews.
© The Canadian Press, 2009
Monday, December 28, 2009
Here is the longest and perhaps the pathetically best summary so far of the news paper dilemma (read my bottom notes):
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and TIM ARANGO
Published: December 27, 2009
Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free.
Jason Reed/Reuters
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation charges for access to The Wall Street Journal and could do the same on Hulu.
Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.
Newspapers, including this one, are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge.
Rupert Murdoch, beyond charging for access to The Journal, has talked about forming a partnership with a single search engine, which would pay him for the rights to scour the news and entertainment programming produced by his company, the News Corporation, rather than letting all search engines crawl his sites. Also Hulu, which is owned partly by Mr. Murdoch’s company, is considering charging viewers to watch some of the TV shows it now streams free.
Magazine publishers, meanwhile, have banded together to try to create their own version of the iTunes store, aiming for a day when they can sell enhanced versions of what they have been giving away. And more and more media companies are planning to charge for apps on iPhones and other mobile devices, as well as on the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.
Media companies of all stripes built their business models on the assumption that advertising would continue to pour into their coffers. But with advertising in a tailspin, they now must shrink, shut down or find some way to shift more of the cost burden to consumers — the same consumers who have so blissfully become accustomed to Web content that costs nothing.
So will future consumers look back on 2010 as the year they finally had to reach into their own pockets?
Industry experts have their doubts, saying that pay systems might work, but in limited ways and only for some sites. Publishers who sounded early this year as though they were raring to go have not yet taken the leap, and the executives who advocate change tend to range from vague to cautious in making any predictions about fundamentally changing the finances of their battered businesses.
But one thing clearly has shifted already, in a year rife with magazine closures and newspaper bankruptcies: conventional wisdom among media companies has swung hard from the belief that pay walls would only curb traffic and stifle ad revenue, to the view that media businesses need to try something new, because the current path appears to lead to extinction.
“Content providers see that the idea that everything has to be free, supported by ads, isn’t working well, and they’re trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, but only partially,” said Alan D. Mutter, a media consultant and blogger who has been an executive at digital media companies.
He went on: “So we’re looking at some sort of an inflection point, at least in attitude. But I haven’t seen much realistic, hard-headed thinking about how that’s going to happen, so I don’t know how much is really going to change.”
Ann S. Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, said, “A lot is going to change over the next two years.” But she conceded that it was very hard to predict the shape of that change, and she said that adding pay walls alone probably would not work.
Of course, it is the established media, with their legacy of high operating costs and outdated technology, that face this problem. Leaner, newer online competitors will continue to be free, avidly picking up the users lost by sites that begin to charge.
Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post, predicted that much of the talk of media’s mining the Web for new revenue would never become reality — and that if it did, free sites like hers would benefit. Some of the plans now being laid might work, she said, but many of them would just alienate the Internet users who click from one site to another, wherever links and their curiosity take them.
“I’m not minimizing the fact that there’s a need to experiment with multiple new business models,” she said. “I just don’t believe in ignoring the current realities.”
For more than a decade, media companies have hoped for a day when they could either control access to their products online or at least put a price on them that a mass market would bear. But that day has never come. What has changed is the level of threat they face, given the worst advertising downturn in memory.
Since the infancy of the Web, there have been predictions that by making information more plentiful and accessible, prices would be steadily driven down, with no bottom in sight. At first, it did not seem to matter: Internet advertising grew at a breakneck pace, and traditional media thrived even as the assumption of free content took root online.
But eventually, the rise of the Internet punished most media, starting with the music industry, in the form of file-sharing. That history offers an object lesson. Despite the success of iTunes and other pay services, illegal downloads remain common.
Print publications are suffering most now, but digital distribution has grown in importance for broadcast television. Nearly all of its content is now available free online, as broadcast media lose audience and advertising. Book publishers are also fighting the tide; Simon & Schuster said recently that it would delay the release of e-book versions of 35 big titles, like Karl Rove’s memoir and a Don DeLillo novel, fearing that the $9.99 digital versions would eat into sales of hardcover copies.
Cable television has been an exception, thriving on subscriber fees, but even there, executives fret that consumers are disentangling themselves from their cable boxes, free to pick and choose individual programs online and watch on their TVs. Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, has advanced a plan that he calls TV Everywhere, which would allow paying cable television subscribers to view shows online for no extra charge.
Similarly, Comcast started a service this month that gives subscribers to its broadband Internet and digital cable services access to its cable programming on the Web.
These efforts are not about wringing extra dollars from the Web but about preserving the current economics of the business.
“We’re saying, since those payments you have made have found their way to the networks and through distributors that give you the connection, that we want to have you be able to watch all those networks on broadband,” Mr. Bewkes said recently at an investor conference in New York.
A leading evangelist for the coming of a new era is Rupert Murdoch, who has said he envisions a not-too-distant day when all of the News Corporation’s news properties, including Fox News Channel, The Times of London and The New York Post, charge online. He and his executives have repeatedly criticized search engines and news aggregators, saying it was “theft” to profit from publishers’ work.
The News Corporation has been shopping around an online payment software system — so far without much success — in hopes of playing pied piper to other publishers, and it is a charter member of the group of magazine publishers that have banded together, in a consortium announced this month. And there have been talks about the possibility of Microsoft paying for the exclusive rights to have its Bing search engine direct users to News Corporation sites.
“Quality content is not free,” Mr. Murdoch wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 8, days after delivering a similar message at a Federal Trade Commission workshop. “In the future, good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organization to attract customers by providing news and information they are willing to pay for.”
People who have studied the problem argue that charging online would work only if consumers were offered a much-improved product with the convenience of access anywhere, on any digital device — the core idea behind the magazine consortium and its planned online store.
By that standard, much of the talk of wringing more money from Internet users rings hollow, said Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and a prominent blogger on media subjects. “People who really think we have to charge or the industry is sunk would be more persuasive if they said at the same time we have to add more value than we’ve been adding,” he said.
And, most industry experts agree, entertainment will be easier to charge for than news. It may be hard to prevent free distribution of an episode of “The Office” or “NCIS,” but the product is unique, with no substitute being created by someone else.
A small number of publications already charge for Internet access, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Newsday, Consumer Reports and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. But they tend to be either specialty products or near-monopolies in local markets, and they generally do not charge enough to fundamentally alter their profit pictures.
But for most general-interest news, any paid site would be competing with alternative versions of the same articles, delivered by multiple free news sources.
“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs,” Mr. Mutter said. “They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.” (end story)
One thing not addressed here is the success of electronic versions of what used to be print. Many magazines such as Road & Track, Penthouse, Smithtonian, Photography, Field & Stream, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science to name a small few have a very successful e-version of their paper produce with enhanced electronic content, for example video and hyper links to advertisers sites and additional editorial content. Scientific American and Metropolis (an architectural magazine) have tried to run on a some what different standards then the most effective one which is Zinio and as a result their experience has been disappointing. Even the Zinio client can be frustrating as many publishers cannot seem to get their head or what ever around the idea of a digital and non physical product. I have a number of subscriptions were the company also sends me a paper copy of the magazine and after many appeals seems unable to stop or even find the paper subscription which I, very tiresomely, am still receiving. However that is only until renewal comes around and then those magazines don't get renewed. There is hope and life in publishing, the publishers just have to clue in.
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and TIM ARANGO
Published: December 27, 2009
Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free.
Jason Reed/Reuters
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation charges for access to The Wall Street Journal and could do the same on Hulu.
Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.
Newspapers, including this one, are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge.
Rupert Murdoch, beyond charging for access to The Journal, has talked about forming a partnership with a single search engine, which would pay him for the rights to scour the news and entertainment programming produced by his company, the News Corporation, rather than letting all search engines crawl his sites. Also Hulu, which is owned partly by Mr. Murdoch’s company, is considering charging viewers to watch some of the TV shows it now streams free.
Magazine publishers, meanwhile, have banded together to try to create their own version of the iTunes store, aiming for a day when they can sell enhanced versions of what they have been giving away. And more and more media companies are planning to charge for apps on iPhones and other mobile devices, as well as on the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.
Media companies of all stripes built their business models on the assumption that advertising would continue to pour into their coffers. But with advertising in a tailspin, they now must shrink, shut down or find some way to shift more of the cost burden to consumers — the same consumers who have so blissfully become accustomed to Web content that costs nothing.
So will future consumers look back on 2010 as the year they finally had to reach into their own pockets?
Industry experts have their doubts, saying that pay systems might work, but in limited ways and only for some sites. Publishers who sounded early this year as though they were raring to go have not yet taken the leap, and the executives who advocate change tend to range from vague to cautious in making any predictions about fundamentally changing the finances of their battered businesses.
But one thing clearly has shifted already, in a year rife with magazine closures and newspaper bankruptcies: conventional wisdom among media companies has swung hard from the belief that pay walls would only curb traffic and stifle ad revenue, to the view that media businesses need to try something new, because the current path appears to lead to extinction.
“Content providers see that the idea that everything has to be free, supported by ads, isn’t working well, and they’re trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, but only partially,” said Alan D. Mutter, a media consultant and blogger who has been an executive at digital media companies.
He went on: “So we’re looking at some sort of an inflection point, at least in attitude. But I haven’t seen much realistic, hard-headed thinking about how that’s going to happen, so I don’t know how much is really going to change.”
Ann S. Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, said, “A lot is going to change over the next two years.” But she conceded that it was very hard to predict the shape of that change, and she said that adding pay walls alone probably would not work.
Of course, it is the established media, with their legacy of high operating costs and outdated technology, that face this problem. Leaner, newer online competitors will continue to be free, avidly picking up the users lost by sites that begin to charge.
Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post, predicted that much of the talk of media’s mining the Web for new revenue would never become reality — and that if it did, free sites like hers would benefit. Some of the plans now being laid might work, she said, but many of them would just alienate the Internet users who click from one site to another, wherever links and their curiosity take them.
“I’m not minimizing the fact that there’s a need to experiment with multiple new business models,” she said. “I just don’t believe in ignoring the current realities.”
For more than a decade, media companies have hoped for a day when they could either control access to their products online or at least put a price on them that a mass market would bear. But that day has never come. What has changed is the level of threat they face, given the worst advertising downturn in memory.
Since the infancy of the Web, there have been predictions that by making information more plentiful and accessible, prices would be steadily driven down, with no bottom in sight. At first, it did not seem to matter: Internet advertising grew at a breakneck pace, and traditional media thrived even as the assumption of free content took root online.
But eventually, the rise of the Internet punished most media, starting with the music industry, in the form of file-sharing. That history offers an object lesson. Despite the success of iTunes and other pay services, illegal downloads remain common.
Print publications are suffering most now, but digital distribution has grown in importance for broadcast television. Nearly all of its content is now available free online, as broadcast media lose audience and advertising. Book publishers are also fighting the tide; Simon & Schuster said recently that it would delay the release of e-book versions of 35 big titles, like Karl Rove’s memoir and a Don DeLillo novel, fearing that the $9.99 digital versions would eat into sales of hardcover copies.
Cable television has been an exception, thriving on subscriber fees, but even there, executives fret that consumers are disentangling themselves from their cable boxes, free to pick and choose individual programs online and watch on their TVs. Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, has advanced a plan that he calls TV Everywhere, which would allow paying cable television subscribers to view shows online for no extra charge.
Similarly, Comcast started a service this month that gives subscribers to its broadband Internet and digital cable services access to its cable programming on the Web.
These efforts are not about wringing extra dollars from the Web but about preserving the current economics of the business.
“We’re saying, since those payments you have made have found their way to the networks and through distributors that give you the connection, that we want to have you be able to watch all those networks on broadband,” Mr. Bewkes said recently at an investor conference in New York.
A leading evangelist for the coming of a new era is Rupert Murdoch, who has said he envisions a not-too-distant day when all of the News Corporation’s news properties, including Fox News Channel, The Times of London and The New York Post, charge online. He and his executives have repeatedly criticized search engines and news aggregators, saying it was “theft” to profit from publishers’ work.
The News Corporation has been shopping around an online payment software system — so far without much success — in hopes of playing pied piper to other publishers, and it is a charter member of the group of magazine publishers that have banded together, in a consortium announced this month. And there have been talks about the possibility of Microsoft paying for the exclusive rights to have its Bing search engine direct users to News Corporation sites.
“Quality content is not free,” Mr. Murdoch wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 8, days after delivering a similar message at a Federal Trade Commission workshop. “In the future, good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organization to attract customers by providing news and information they are willing to pay for.”
People who have studied the problem argue that charging online would work only if consumers were offered a much-improved product with the convenience of access anywhere, on any digital device — the core idea behind the magazine consortium and its planned online store.
By that standard, much of the talk of wringing more money from Internet users rings hollow, said Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and a prominent blogger on media subjects. “People who really think we have to charge or the industry is sunk would be more persuasive if they said at the same time we have to add more value than we’ve been adding,” he said.
And, most industry experts agree, entertainment will be easier to charge for than news. It may be hard to prevent free distribution of an episode of “The Office” or “NCIS,” but the product is unique, with no substitute being created by someone else.
A small number of publications already charge for Internet access, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Newsday, Consumer Reports and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. But they tend to be either specialty products or near-monopolies in local markets, and they generally do not charge enough to fundamentally alter their profit pictures.
But for most general-interest news, any paid site would be competing with alternative versions of the same articles, delivered by multiple free news sources.
“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs,” Mr. Mutter said. “They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.” (end story)
One thing not addressed here is the success of electronic versions of what used to be print. Many magazines such as Road & Track, Penthouse, Smithtonian, Photography, Field & Stream, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science to name a small few have a very successful e-version of their paper produce with enhanced electronic content, for example video and hyper links to advertisers sites and additional editorial content. Scientific American and Metropolis (an architectural magazine) have tried to run on a some what different standards then the most effective one which is Zinio and as a result their experience has been disappointing. Even the Zinio client can be frustrating as many publishers cannot seem to get their head or what ever around the idea of a digital and non physical product. I have a number of subscriptions were the company also sends me a paper copy of the magazine and after many appeals seems unable to stop or even find the paper subscription which I, very tiresomely, am still receiving. However that is only until renewal comes around and then those magazines don't get renewed. There is hope and life in publishing, the publishers just have to clue in.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Here from the New York Times: How Dangerous it is to be a journalist who is doing his job well:
Kyrgyz President Blamed in Homicide
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: December 22, 2009
MOSCOW — A prominent opposition journalist in Kyrgyzstan, whose autocratic president has been courted by the United States as an ally for the war in Afghanistan, died on Tuesday after being thrown last week from a sixth-story window, his arms and legs bound with duct tape.
Related
Times Topics: Kyrgyzstan
The journalist, Gennadi Pavlyuk, was on a business trip in Almaty, the commercial capital of neighboring Kazakhstan, when he was attacked on Dec. 16, the authorities said. He was in a coma before dying of severe trauma on Tuesday. His colleagues said he was 40 years old, with a wife and son.
Opposition politicians in Kyrgyzstan blamed the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, for the killing, saying that he was escalating his efforts to eliminate dissent in the country. Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman said the government had nothing to do with the attack on Mr. Pavlyuk.
Since taking power in 2005, Mr. Bakiyev has steadily tightened his grip on Kyrgyzstan, a poor former Soviet republic in the mountains of Central Asia, and in recent years, numerous opposition leaders and journalists have been attacked. Some have died, and rarely if ever has anyone been held accountable.
In just the last few weeks, a well-known political scientist, a former senior official and a journalist were severely beaten in Kyrgyzstan. They all attributed the attacks to the security services, according to local news media.
While human rights groups have assailed Mr. Bakiyev, the United States has largely focused on maintaining good relations with him in order to keep an important air base on the outskirts of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, that supports NATO’s mission in Afghanistan.
Mr. Bakiyev announced in February that he would evict the United States from the base. After intensive lobbying by the Obama administration, he reversed course in June, in return for additional rent and other concessions.
In July, Mr. Bakiyev easily won another term as president in an election that international monitors said was marred by widespread fraud.
Investigators in Kazakhstan said Mr. Pavlyuk arrived in Almaty on Dec. 16 and checked into a hotel before leaving with an unidentified man. Two hours later, he was pushed out the sixth-floor window of a rented apartment in a residential building, landing on a first-floor canopy.
A roll of the duct tape that had been used to bind his hands and legs was found in the apartment.
Mr. Pavlyuk was the former chief editor of the Bishkek edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a major Russian tabloid newspaper based in Moscow.
Over the last year, he had become more politically active, working closely with Omurbek Tekebaev, a former speaker of the Kyrgyz Parliament who is a senior opposition leader.
To support Mr. Tekebaev’s party, Mr. Pavlyuk was planning a new opposition Web site.
Mr. Tekebaev said in a telephone interview that he had no doubt that the Kyrgyz government had ordered Mr. Pavlyuk killed because he had become more outspoken against the president. Mr. Tekebaev said the Kyrgyz security services often lured people to nearby countries and killed them.
“They do that to avoid suspicion. They do their activities outside of Kyrgyzstan,” Mr. Tekebaev said. “This is not the first time that this has happened abroad to a member of the opposition. We believe that this was a political killing directed at intimidating the news media. It is an attempt at frightening society.”
Almaz Turdumamatov, Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman, said he hoped that the police in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan would conduct a thorough inquiry and bring the culprits to justice.
“The murder of any person, whether a journalist or not, concerns us,” Mr. Turdumamatov said. “Who is responsible for this must be determined by the investigators.”
Asked about the opposition’s allegations that its supporters were being persecuted, he said: “It is unfortunate that this killing happened. But it is wrong to say that this was connected to any kind of political motivation.”
In an interview in July at the presidential residence, Mr. Bakiyev suggested that journalists who had been attacked might have been involved in shady dealings or were perhaps just unlucky.
“Sometimes, things happen by chance,” Mr. Bakiyev said. “For it to have been purposeful from a political point of view, that sort of politics doesn’t exist here.”
Daniil Kislov, chief editor of Ferghana.ru, a Web site based in Moscow that covers Central Asia, said Mr. Pavlyuk’s killing had shocked journalists in the region because it was so brazen, as if it were an organized crime hit.
Mr. Kislov said the killing reminded him of the slaying of another Kyrgyz journalist, Alisher Saipov, who contributed to Ferghana.ru and the Voice of America. Mr. Saipov was shot to death in 2007 while waiting for a taxi in a Kyrgyz city. No one has been arrested in the case.
“These killings are being done by people who are absolutely convinced that they will never be caught and never be punished,” Mr. Kislov said.
Mr. Pavlyuk was chief editor for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Bishkek in 2006 and 2007, said the newspaper’s current chief editor, Aleksandr Rogoza.
Mr. Rogoza said Mr. Pavlyuk had a lifelong affection for Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, which is famous for its beauty and is one of the largest mountain lakes in the world.
“He wrote a lot about the lake,” Mr. Rogoza said. “He built a house there, and he spent a lot of time there. He just loved that place.”
Kyrgyz President Blamed in Homicide
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: December 22, 2009
MOSCOW — A prominent opposition journalist in Kyrgyzstan, whose autocratic president has been courted by the United States as an ally for the war in Afghanistan, died on Tuesday after being thrown last week from a sixth-story window, his arms and legs bound with duct tape.
Related
Times Topics: Kyrgyzstan
The journalist, Gennadi Pavlyuk, was on a business trip in Almaty, the commercial capital of neighboring Kazakhstan, when he was attacked on Dec. 16, the authorities said. He was in a coma before dying of severe trauma on Tuesday. His colleagues said he was 40 years old, with a wife and son.
Opposition politicians in Kyrgyzstan blamed the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, for the killing, saying that he was escalating his efforts to eliminate dissent in the country. Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman said the government had nothing to do with the attack on Mr. Pavlyuk.
Since taking power in 2005, Mr. Bakiyev has steadily tightened his grip on Kyrgyzstan, a poor former Soviet republic in the mountains of Central Asia, and in recent years, numerous opposition leaders and journalists have been attacked. Some have died, and rarely if ever has anyone been held accountable.
In just the last few weeks, a well-known political scientist, a former senior official and a journalist were severely beaten in Kyrgyzstan. They all attributed the attacks to the security services, according to local news media.
While human rights groups have assailed Mr. Bakiyev, the United States has largely focused on maintaining good relations with him in order to keep an important air base on the outskirts of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, that supports NATO’s mission in Afghanistan.
Mr. Bakiyev announced in February that he would evict the United States from the base. After intensive lobbying by the Obama administration, he reversed course in June, in return for additional rent and other concessions.
In July, Mr. Bakiyev easily won another term as president in an election that international monitors said was marred by widespread fraud.
Investigators in Kazakhstan said Mr. Pavlyuk arrived in Almaty on Dec. 16 and checked into a hotel before leaving with an unidentified man. Two hours later, he was pushed out the sixth-floor window of a rented apartment in a residential building, landing on a first-floor canopy.
A roll of the duct tape that had been used to bind his hands and legs was found in the apartment.
Mr. Pavlyuk was the former chief editor of the Bishkek edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a major Russian tabloid newspaper based in Moscow.
Over the last year, he had become more politically active, working closely with Omurbek Tekebaev, a former speaker of the Kyrgyz Parliament who is a senior opposition leader.
To support Mr. Tekebaev’s party, Mr. Pavlyuk was planning a new opposition Web site.
Mr. Tekebaev said in a telephone interview that he had no doubt that the Kyrgyz government had ordered Mr. Pavlyuk killed because he had become more outspoken against the president. Mr. Tekebaev said the Kyrgyz security services often lured people to nearby countries and killed them.
“They do that to avoid suspicion. They do their activities outside of Kyrgyzstan,” Mr. Tekebaev said. “This is not the first time that this has happened abroad to a member of the opposition. We believe that this was a political killing directed at intimidating the news media. It is an attempt at frightening society.”
Almaz Turdumamatov, Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman, said he hoped that the police in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan would conduct a thorough inquiry and bring the culprits to justice.
“The murder of any person, whether a journalist or not, concerns us,” Mr. Turdumamatov said. “Who is responsible for this must be determined by the investigators.”
Asked about the opposition’s allegations that its supporters were being persecuted, he said: “It is unfortunate that this killing happened. But it is wrong to say that this was connected to any kind of political motivation.”
In an interview in July at the presidential residence, Mr. Bakiyev suggested that journalists who had been attacked might have been involved in shady dealings or were perhaps just unlucky.
“Sometimes, things happen by chance,” Mr. Bakiyev said. “For it to have been purposeful from a political point of view, that sort of politics doesn’t exist here.”
Daniil Kislov, chief editor of Ferghana.ru, a Web site based in Moscow that covers Central Asia, said Mr. Pavlyuk’s killing had shocked journalists in the region because it was so brazen, as if it were an organized crime hit.
Mr. Kislov said the killing reminded him of the slaying of another Kyrgyz journalist, Alisher Saipov, who contributed to Ferghana.ru and the Voice of America. Mr. Saipov was shot to death in 2007 while waiting for a taxi in a Kyrgyz city. No one has been arrested in the case.
“These killings are being done by people who are absolutely convinced that they will never be caught and never be punished,” Mr. Kislov said.
Mr. Pavlyuk was chief editor for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Bishkek in 2006 and 2007, said the newspaper’s current chief editor, Aleksandr Rogoza.
Mr. Rogoza said Mr. Pavlyuk had a lifelong affection for Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, which is famous for its beauty and is one of the largest mountain lakes in the world.
“He wrote a lot about the lake,” Mr. Rogoza said. “He built a house there, and he spent a lot of time there. He just loved that place.”
Friday, December 18, 2009
Here's a funny one on science journalism from Scientific American: December 18, 2009
The "Problem" with a Public Interest in Science
A humorous warning for the media coverage of science
By Steve Mirsky
In October a blog post circulated widely in the science journalism community. Larry Husten mused at CardioBrief.org about the potential benefits to society if only mainstream newspapers covered science with as much dedication as they cover baseball. Indeed, it might be wonderful. But as a big sports fan, I know that there could be unexpected consequences of heightened media interest in science. For example, imagine all-science talk radio:
“Aaaaand good afternoon, everybody, how are your vital signs today?! Mike and the Mad Scientist with you here on QED radio, simulcast on the Nobel TV Network! How are you, Michael?”
“Fine, Mad Sci, good, the new issues of Nature and Science are out, lots to discuss, including an update on the state of the Mars rovers. Spirit has a bum wheel and has been on the disabled list, but NASA has some tricks that might get it back in the field.”
“And they published the genome of the horse! I hope that comes in handy at the Belmont, Michael.”
“Don’t bet on it, Sci. Listen, they’ve had the human genome sequenced for, what, 10 years, 12 years they’ve had the human genome sequenced and they’re still giving you and me the same meds, not personalized meds, and they’ve had the genome sequenced for, what, 10 years, 12 years.”
“Good point, Michael, excellent point. Whaddya say, let’s go to the phones and hear what science fans out there have on their minds today. Morris from Rego Park, you’re on QED.”
“Hi, Sci, hi, Mike, first time long time.”
“What’s on your mind today, Morris?”
“I wanted to float a trade by you guys. How about Harvard trades Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky for Sean Carroll and a postdoc to be named later?”
“Which Sean Carroll ya talking about, Morris buddy? There’s the physicist Sean Carroll at Caltech, and there’s the evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll at Wisconsin–Madison, and you can’t just call up and float a trade like that without saying which Sean Carroll, can ya, Michael?!”
“That’s a problem, Sci, and then there’s a bigger problem—Noam Chomsky isn’t at Harvard, he’s at M.I.T. Chomsky’s at M.I.T. Pinker’s at Harvard. He used to be at M.I.T., Pinker, Pinker used to be at M.I.T., but now he’s at Harvard. Chomsky’s at M.I.T., he’s at M.I.T., so you can’t put the package together in the first place, because Chomsky’s at M.I.T.”
“There you have it, Mo, you gotta do a little more homework before you call in, a little more housework. Here we go, Jeremy from Manhattan.” (The Twilight Zone theme plays in the background, as it does whenever Jeremy calls in.) “Hello, Jeremy.”
“Evolution’s just a theory! Global warming’s a hoax!"
“And goodbye, Jeremy. Jeremy’s meniscus is touching the bottom of the graduated cylinder there. Short Hal from Queens on the line, what’s up, Short Hal?”
“Not much, Sci, how are your liver enzyme levels today?”
“You’re a wise guy, Short Hal. Short Hal’s a hepatologist in his spare time, what’s on your mind, Hal?”
“Well, Sci, I’m talking to my friend, and he says that grad students are doing all kind of performance-enhancing substances, stuff like Mountain Dew, double espressos. And I just don’t know if you can compare the results they’re getting with the stuff that the old-timers did without these kinds of enhancers.”
“Hal, this is Mike, listen, you think Heisenberg wasn’t on massive doses of caffeine? He did his best work, when, in his early 20s? You think he was sleeping more than, what, two hours a night, three hours a night? Don’t kid yourself, there was stuff they did back then, maybe not Mountain Dew, but they had ways to keep working all night. I’ll tell you what they didn’t have back then, they didn’t have competitors coming in from all over the world to their labs to compete with them. If anything, these kids today, they’re on average better. I’m not saying that the best ones are better than, say, your Einsteins or your Feynmans, but I’d say on average the average ones are better today than the average ones were back then, pound for pound.”
“Michael, time for the atomic clock update with Burgess Shale, right after this word from Beckman Instruments. If your analytical balance botches your breakthroughs, better buy a Beckman. We’ll be right back.” (The Nobel Network’s camera picks up Mike and Mad Sci browsing the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Physical Review Letters, while the Irving Berlin song He Ain’t Got Rhythm, starting at the lyric “With a problem scientific, he’s colossal and terrific,” plays them off ...)
Note: This story was originally printed with the title "Careful What You Wish For"
The "Problem" with a Public Interest in Science
A humorous warning for the media coverage of science
By Steve Mirsky
In October a blog post circulated widely in the science journalism community. Larry Husten mused at CardioBrief.org about the potential benefits to society if only mainstream newspapers covered science with as much dedication as they cover baseball. Indeed, it might be wonderful. But as a big sports fan, I know that there could be unexpected consequences of heightened media interest in science. For example, imagine all-science talk radio:
“Aaaaand good afternoon, everybody, how are your vital signs today?! Mike and the Mad Scientist with you here on QED radio, simulcast on the Nobel TV Network! How are you, Michael?”
“Fine, Mad Sci, good, the new issues of Nature and Science are out, lots to discuss, including an update on the state of the Mars rovers. Spirit has a bum wheel and has been on the disabled list, but NASA has some tricks that might get it back in the field.”
“And they published the genome of the horse! I hope that comes in handy at the Belmont, Michael.”
“Don’t bet on it, Sci. Listen, they’ve had the human genome sequenced for, what, 10 years, 12 years they’ve had the human genome sequenced and they’re still giving you and me the same meds, not personalized meds, and they’ve had the genome sequenced for, what, 10 years, 12 years.”
“Good point, Michael, excellent point. Whaddya say, let’s go to the phones and hear what science fans out there have on their minds today. Morris from Rego Park, you’re on QED.”
“Hi, Sci, hi, Mike, first time long time.”
“What’s on your mind today, Morris?”
“I wanted to float a trade by you guys. How about Harvard trades Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky for Sean Carroll and a postdoc to be named later?”
“Which Sean Carroll ya talking about, Morris buddy? There’s the physicist Sean Carroll at Caltech, and there’s the evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll at Wisconsin–Madison, and you can’t just call up and float a trade like that without saying which Sean Carroll, can ya, Michael?!”
“That’s a problem, Sci, and then there’s a bigger problem—Noam Chomsky isn’t at Harvard, he’s at M.I.T. Chomsky’s at M.I.T. Pinker’s at Harvard. He used to be at M.I.T., Pinker, Pinker used to be at M.I.T., but now he’s at Harvard. Chomsky’s at M.I.T., he’s at M.I.T., so you can’t put the package together in the first place, because Chomsky’s at M.I.T.”
“There you have it, Mo, you gotta do a little more homework before you call in, a little more housework. Here we go, Jeremy from Manhattan.” (The Twilight Zone theme plays in the background, as it does whenever Jeremy calls in.) “Hello, Jeremy.”
“Evolution’s just a theory! Global warming’s a hoax!"
“And goodbye, Jeremy. Jeremy’s meniscus is touching the bottom of the graduated cylinder there. Short Hal from Queens on the line, what’s up, Short Hal?”
“Not much, Sci, how are your liver enzyme levels today?”
“You’re a wise guy, Short Hal. Short Hal’s a hepatologist in his spare time, what’s on your mind, Hal?”
“Well, Sci, I’m talking to my friend, and he says that grad students are doing all kind of performance-enhancing substances, stuff like Mountain Dew, double espressos. And I just don’t know if you can compare the results they’re getting with the stuff that the old-timers did without these kinds of enhancers.”
“Hal, this is Mike, listen, you think Heisenberg wasn’t on massive doses of caffeine? He did his best work, when, in his early 20s? You think he was sleeping more than, what, two hours a night, three hours a night? Don’t kid yourself, there was stuff they did back then, maybe not Mountain Dew, but they had ways to keep working all night. I’ll tell you what they didn’t have back then, they didn’t have competitors coming in from all over the world to their labs to compete with them. If anything, these kids today, they’re on average better. I’m not saying that the best ones are better than, say, your Einsteins or your Feynmans, but I’d say on average the average ones are better today than the average ones were back then, pound for pound.”
“Michael, time for the atomic clock update with Burgess Shale, right after this word from Beckman Instruments. If your analytical balance botches your breakthroughs, better buy a Beckman. We’ll be right back.” (The Nobel Network’s camera picks up Mike and Mad Sci browsing the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Physical Review Letters, while the Irving Berlin song He Ain’t Got Rhythm, starting at the lyric “With a problem scientific, he’s colossal and terrific,” plays them off ...)
Note: This story was originally printed with the title "Careful What You Wish For"
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Is Journalism still worth while? Well here is one use and answer:
Press Release 09-239
Computer Science Via Interactive Journalism
An innovative project teaches students computer science skills by creating an online magazine
Students participating in the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers.
Credit and Larger Version
December 10, 2009
Do only computer scientists need an education in computer science? In today's innovation-driven economy, the answer is 'not anymore'.
Since the skills learned in computer science, like complex problem solving and analytical reasoning skills, are important for building a foundation for numerous careers including jobs in science and technology, as well as jobs in marketing, journalism and the creative arts, most people will need an education in computer science. Even though the United States is a leader in the field of computer science at the college level, most middle and high school students receive no exposure to computer science. One major obstacle to educating young students in computer science is finding a space for a computer science class in an already overburdened K-12 curriculum.
Ursula Wolz, researcher from the College of New Jersey, developed an innovative solution for providing students with an education in computer science with the support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Unlike traditional computer science courses where students learn computer science programming through a textbook, Wolz and her team decided to take advantage of how 21st century journalism is becoming more dependent on computer science. Wolz and her colleagues started a summer institute and an afterschool problem where students learned computer programming skills while developing an online magazine.
The summer institute not only exposed the students to computer science, but also attracted them to computer science through the interactive journalism, which showed the students that computer science skills are needed in a number of different professions to solve a diverse set of real world problems.
In their project, which is funded by the NSF's Broadening Participation in Computing program, Wolz and her colleagues designed an Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers (IJIMS). IJIMS is a partnership between The College of New Jersey and Fisher Middle School in Ewing, New Jersey. They recruited middle school teachers, mostly language arts teachers, for a one-week institute where they learned how to create an online magazine.
During the second week, the teachers were joined by rising 8th grade students and the teachers became mentors to the students. During the two weeks, the teachers and students learn how to use Scratch, a graphical, syntax free, computer programming language. Since coding in Scratch is done with graphical blocks that snap together, much like LEGO bricks or pieces of a puzzle, it is easy for computer programming novices like middle school teachers and students, to learn how to program interactive animations and videos.
During the summer institute, students researched, prepared interviews, videotaped, edited the interviews and developed Scratch projects to supplement their stories with animations or games. At the conclusion of the two weeks, the teachers and students had developed an online magazine.
There were 16 students in the first summer. By the second summer institute, the number of students had increased to 30. This strong interest in the project led the teachers and students to develop an afterschool program to run the online magazine during the academic year. The articles developed by the students for the online magazine concern a diverse set of issues. Articles span from interviews with the city mayor to articles discussing complex issues like the death penalty and animal rights.
Wolz and her team wanted to use the summer institute and afterschool program as a way to expose students to computer programming, teach them a graphical computer programming language, show them how computer programming is used outside of traditional computer science areas and to increase the students' confidence in their ability to use computing methods.
The researchers surveyed the students to see whether they had achieved their goals and discovered that they had been very successful. The survey found that students had changed their perception about computer programming.
After participating in the summer institute, the students no longer held several common beliefs about computer programmers, like computer programmers work by themselves or computer programmers are not creative. The survey also found that after participating in the summer institute, the students reported that there was a similar relationship between computer science and journalism.
Finally, the survey found that after participating in the summer institute, the students reported a significant increase in their competence in the area of computer science. At the end of the summer institute, there were a larger number of students saying that they could create a computer program as compared to the first day of the summer institute.
This unique project is a solid example of how to teach computer science skills and attract young students to computer science by using a non-traditional computer science field. By implementing a computer science curriculum outside of school hours, Wolz and her team found a solution to the problem of implementing a computer science curriculum without removing courses from the curriculum or increasing the curriculum load.
In addition, this project demonstrates how to teach the skills learned by computer science such as complex problem solving and analytic skills by using a non-traditional computer science problem. The researchers taught computer programming to students by using the real-world problem of how 21st century journalism is becoming more interactive. To work in this new interactive journalism field, a 21st century journalist will need the computer programming skills required to create animations and videos to accompany their stories.
-NSF-
Press Release 09-239
Computer Science Via Interactive Journalism
An innovative project teaches students computer science skills by creating an online magazine
Students participating in the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers.
Credit and Larger Version
December 10, 2009
Do only computer scientists need an education in computer science? In today's innovation-driven economy, the answer is 'not anymore'.
Since the skills learned in computer science, like complex problem solving and analytical reasoning skills, are important for building a foundation for numerous careers including jobs in science and technology, as well as jobs in marketing, journalism and the creative arts, most people will need an education in computer science. Even though the United States is a leader in the field of computer science at the college level, most middle and high school students receive no exposure to computer science. One major obstacle to educating young students in computer science is finding a space for a computer science class in an already overburdened K-12 curriculum.
Ursula Wolz, researcher from the College of New Jersey, developed an innovative solution for providing students with an education in computer science with the support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Unlike traditional computer science courses where students learn computer science programming through a textbook, Wolz and her team decided to take advantage of how 21st century journalism is becoming more dependent on computer science. Wolz and her colleagues started a summer institute and an afterschool problem where students learned computer programming skills while developing an online magazine.
The summer institute not only exposed the students to computer science, but also attracted them to computer science through the interactive journalism, which showed the students that computer science skills are needed in a number of different professions to solve a diverse set of real world problems.
In their project, which is funded by the NSF's Broadening Participation in Computing program, Wolz and her colleagues designed an Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers (IJIMS). IJIMS is a partnership between The College of New Jersey and Fisher Middle School in Ewing, New Jersey. They recruited middle school teachers, mostly language arts teachers, for a one-week institute where they learned how to create an online magazine.
During the second week, the teachers were joined by rising 8th grade students and the teachers became mentors to the students. During the two weeks, the teachers and students learn how to use Scratch, a graphical, syntax free, computer programming language. Since coding in Scratch is done with graphical blocks that snap together, much like LEGO bricks or pieces of a puzzle, it is easy for computer programming novices like middle school teachers and students, to learn how to program interactive animations and videos.
During the summer institute, students researched, prepared interviews, videotaped, edited the interviews and developed Scratch projects to supplement their stories with animations or games. At the conclusion of the two weeks, the teachers and students had developed an online magazine.
There were 16 students in the first summer. By the second summer institute, the number of students had increased to 30. This strong interest in the project led the teachers and students to develop an afterschool program to run the online magazine during the academic year. The articles developed by the students for the online magazine concern a diverse set of issues. Articles span from interviews with the city mayor to articles discussing complex issues like the death penalty and animal rights.
Wolz and her team wanted to use the summer institute and afterschool program as a way to expose students to computer programming, teach them a graphical computer programming language, show them how computer programming is used outside of traditional computer science areas and to increase the students' confidence in their ability to use computing methods.
The researchers surveyed the students to see whether they had achieved their goals and discovered that they had been very successful. The survey found that students had changed their perception about computer programming.
After participating in the summer institute, the students no longer held several common beliefs about computer programmers, like computer programmers work by themselves or computer programmers are not creative. The survey also found that after participating in the summer institute, the students reported that there was a similar relationship between computer science and journalism.
Finally, the survey found that after participating in the summer institute, the students reported a significant increase in their competence in the area of computer science. At the end of the summer institute, there were a larger number of students saying that they could create a computer program as compared to the first day of the summer institute.
This unique project is a solid example of how to teach computer science skills and attract young students to computer science by using a non-traditional computer science field. By implementing a computer science curriculum outside of school hours, Wolz and her team found a solution to the problem of implementing a computer science curriculum without removing courses from the curriculum or increasing the curriculum load.
In addition, this project demonstrates how to teach the skills learned by computer science such as complex problem solving and analytic skills by using a non-traditional computer science problem. The researchers taught computer programming to students by using the real-world problem of how 21st century journalism is becoming more interactive. To work in this new interactive journalism field, a 21st century journalist will need the computer programming skills required to create animations and videos to accompany their stories.
-NSF-
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Here is a roundup of the pro and cons of what we think of as journalism:
The Noisy and Prolonged Death of Journalism |
| from the fat-lady-in-the-wings dept. |
| posted by kdawson on Friday December 04, @08:57 (Google) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/12/04/1350252/The-Noisy-and-Prolonged-Death-of-Journalis|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
The war of words between the old and the new media is heating up some
more. [0]Eric Schmidt has an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (ironic, that)
explaining to newspapers how Google wants to, and is trying to, help
them. Kara Swisher's BoomTown column [1]translates and deconstructs
Schmidt's argument, hilariously. A few days back, the Washington Post's
Michael Gerson became the latest journo to [2]bemoan the death of
journalism at the hands of the Internet; and investigative blogger
[3]Radley Balko quickly called B.S. on Gerson's claim that (all?)
bloggers simply steal from (all?) hard-working, honest, ethical print
journalists.
Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/12/04/1350252
Links:
0. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574569570797550520.html?mod=rss_Today's_Most_Popular
1. http://kara.allthingsd.com/20091203/boomtown-decodes-google-ceo-schmidts-shut-up-you-whiny-news-folk-op-ed-so-you-dont-have-to/
2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/25/AR2009112503534_pf.html
3. http://www.theagitator.com/2009/11/30/dem-thievin-blogs/
The Noisy and Prolonged Death of Journalism |
| from the fat-lady-in-the-wings dept. |
| posted by kdawson on Friday December 04, @08:57 (Google) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/12/04/1350252/The-Noisy-and-Prolonged-Death-of-Journalis|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
The war of words between the old and the new media is heating up some
more. [0]Eric Schmidt has an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (ironic, that)
explaining to newspapers how Google wants to, and is trying to, help
them. Kara Swisher's BoomTown column [1]translates and deconstructs
Schmidt's argument, hilariously. A few days back, the Washington Post's
Michael Gerson became the latest journo to [2]bemoan the death of
journalism at the hands of the Internet; and investigative blogger
[3]Radley Balko quickly called B.S. on Gerson's claim that (all?)
bloggers simply steal from (all?) hard-working, honest, ethical print
journalists.
Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/12/04/1350252
Links:
0. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574569570797550520.html?mod=rss_Today's_Most_Popular
1. http://kara.allthingsd.com/20091203/boomtown-decodes-google-ceo-schmidts-shut-up-you-whiny-news-folk-op-ed-so-you-dont-have-to/
2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/25/AR2009112503534_pf.html
3. http://www.theagitator.com/2009/11/30/dem-thievin-blogs/
Monday, November 23, 2009
The split and competition between print media and the internet continues:
In Chicago, Ex-Editor Fights Back
By RICHARD PREZ-PEA
Internet-based local news organizations are drawing
big-name journalists, including veterans of the established
news outlets they are competing with.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/business/media/23local.html?th&emc=th
In Chicago, Ex-Editor Fights Back
By RICHARD PREZ-PEA
Internet-based local news organizations are drawing
big-name journalists, including veterans of the established
news outlets they are competing with.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/business/media/23local.html?th&emc=th
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Still doing some things right some of the time:
Press Release 09-229
Science Journalism Awards Announced
Winners of AAAS Kavli Awards include television and radio stories supported by NSF
Neil deGrasse Tyson examines an unpolished man-made diamond, fresh out of the grower.
Credit and Larger Version
November 19, 2009
A television feature about growing diamonds in the lab, and a radio story that dramatizes some strange coincidences in a discussion of randomness and probability won recognition earlier this month in the 2009 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. Both programs were funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
"Diamond Factory" was produced by Julia Cort for WGBH's NOVA science NOW, and aired on public television stations in June. It features host Neil deGrasse Tyson showing how materials science offers the means to engineer diamonds with the strength and conductivity of the real thing. Along the way, Tyson variously adopts the persona of Indiana Jones and travels blindfolded to the diamond producers' top-secret location, where he learns that diamonds that can be customized in size and shape offer a valuable resource for future electronics, transportation and communications.
"Julia Cort is a master of expressing complicated ideas in a way that's easy to understand and compelling in following the story," said Paula Apsell, senior executive producer, NOVA, and director of the WGBH science unit. "The techniques she used are emblematic of the approach we take at NOVA scienceNOW, creating stories that are educational and entertaining and, critically, that appeal to families."
"A Very Lucky Wind" was produced by Jad Abumrad, Soren Wheeler and Robert Krulwich at WNYC's Radio Lab and also aired in June. It begins with the story of a girl in England, Laura Buxton, who sends a balloon into the air--but not before attaching a label that said, "Please send back to Laura Buxton." The balloon winds up touching down 140 miles away in the yard of a girl with the same name, of the same age, and sharing many other traits. The producers use this as a departure point for a spirited discussion of randomness versus fate, incorporating the perspectives of University of California, Berkeley statistician Deborah Nolan and Jay Koehler, professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.
Jad Abumrad said the show was inspired by questions about the true state of randomness.
"What is a miracle? What is the mathematical threshold for a miracle?" said Abumrad. "These were among our questions. And we learned that given enough time, strange things will happen."
The 2009 awards are the first to be given under a new endowment by The Kavli Foundation. In recognition of that endowment, the awards--first given in 1945--are now called the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. The Foundation, based in Oxnard, California, is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.
Independent panels of science journalists select the winners of the awards. The winners for each category will receive $3000 and a plaque at the 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego in February.
-NSF-
Press Release 09-229
Science Journalism Awards Announced
Winners of AAAS Kavli Awards include television and radio stories supported by NSF
Neil deGrasse Tyson examines an unpolished man-made diamond, fresh out of the grower.
Credit and Larger Version
November 19, 2009
A television feature about growing diamonds in the lab, and a radio story that dramatizes some strange coincidences in a discussion of randomness and probability won recognition earlier this month in the 2009 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. Both programs were funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
"Diamond Factory" was produced by Julia Cort for WGBH's NOVA science NOW, and aired on public television stations in June. It features host Neil deGrasse Tyson showing how materials science offers the means to engineer diamonds with the strength and conductivity of the real thing. Along the way, Tyson variously adopts the persona of Indiana Jones and travels blindfolded to the diamond producers' top-secret location, where he learns that diamonds that can be customized in size and shape offer a valuable resource for future electronics, transportation and communications.
"Julia Cort is a master of expressing complicated ideas in a way that's easy to understand and compelling in following the story," said Paula Apsell, senior executive producer, NOVA, and director of the WGBH science unit. "The techniques she used are emblematic of the approach we take at NOVA scienceNOW, creating stories that are educational and entertaining and, critically, that appeal to families."
"A Very Lucky Wind" was produced by Jad Abumrad, Soren Wheeler and Robert Krulwich at WNYC's Radio Lab and also aired in June. It begins with the story of a girl in England, Laura Buxton, who sends a balloon into the air--but not before attaching a label that said, "Please send back to Laura Buxton." The balloon winds up touching down 140 miles away in the yard of a girl with the same name, of the same age, and sharing many other traits. The producers use this as a departure point for a spirited discussion of randomness versus fate, incorporating the perspectives of University of California, Berkeley statistician Deborah Nolan and Jay Koehler, professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.
Jad Abumrad said the show was inspired by questions about the true state of randomness.
"What is a miracle? What is the mathematical threshold for a miracle?" said Abumrad. "These were among our questions. And we learned that given enough time, strange things will happen."
The 2009 awards are the first to be given under a new endowment by The Kavli Foundation. In recognition of that endowment, the awards--first given in 1945--are now called the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. The Foundation, based in Oxnard, California, is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.
Independent panels of science journalists select the winners of the awards. The winners for each category will receive $3000 and a plaque at the 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego in February.
-NSF-
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Well I hope that this will make some changes into how investigative journalism occurs in Japan: From The New York Times-
New Leaders in Japan Seek to End Cozy Ties to Press Clubs
By MARTIN FACKLER
The authorities are expanding access to journalists who
don't belong to cartel-like media groups that analysts
say have produced a relatively spineless press.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/world/asia/21japan.html?th&emc=th
New Leaders in Japan Seek to End Cozy Ties to Press Clubs
By MARTIN FACKLER
The authorities are expanding access to journalists who
don't belong to cartel-like media groups that analysts
say have produced a relatively spineless press.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/world/asia/21japan.html?th&emc=th
Friday, November 20, 2009
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