Wow, here is something else to talk about:

Stauber Lectures on the Public Relations World
Source: The Northern Iowan, November 11, 2010


CMD Founder John Stauber
The field of public relations is essentially dark, covert operations carried out by skilled propaganda professionals. That was the message delivered by Center for Media and Democracy founder and investigative journalist John Stauber in a lecture at the University of Northern Iowa November 8. Stauber said he first encountered the field of PR and its effects in 1990 when he started working with a group of small dairy farmers who where upset after finding out that some dairies were injecting bovine growth hormone into cows to increase their milk production. The hormone was unnecessary, and milk from the cows was the first genetically-engineered food product on the market, but the subject was little-covered by the news media. Stauber discovered that was because of the work of public relations professionals. He has since authored several books on the covert activities of the PR industry, including "Weapons of Mass Deception: Bush's War on Iraq," about the PR spin that duped the country into accepting an unnecessary war in Iraq. In a Q&A session at the end of his lecture, a fired-up public relations major asked whether Stauber was shedding a negative light on the PR world. "My background is not in public relations, my job isn't to police public relations and it's not to improve public relations. I'm an investigative reporter who is interested in exposing how propaganda campaigns work to help people use that information," Stauber replied.

This book review from Mantex is maybe a little long for you, however important enough for me to post and you to read.
Here Comes Everybody

how change happens when people come together

Clay Shirky’s basic argument is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.


Here Comes EverybodyThe classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.

A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.

There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.

The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.

The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.

Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.

There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.

The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.

The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’

Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.

He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.

His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.

Hi just a reminder that I will check and mark your blogs on the 28th of this month...they can have a pass or fail affect on your grade..so give it all you've got

Some people take living on this planet seriously and they put them selves on the line always. Take a look at these posters from wiki leaks:>http://picasaweb.google.com/AoC4WL/WikiLeaksPosters?ref=nf#
See you next week in the Media Lab on the 6th Flr. Goucher Building for the end of 'The Cove', no pop corn.

Here is another try at making newspapers viable again:
More Than 100,000 Pay for British News Site
By ERIC PFANNER
Published: November 2, 2010


The News Corporation said on Tuesday that it had gained 105,000 paying customers for the digital versions of The Times and The Sunday Times of London since it started charging for access to their Web sites this summer.
Enlarge This Image
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News

The Times and The Sunday Times of London began charging for access last June, and lost fewer visitors than they had expected.
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The company said about half of those additions were regular, active subscribers to the newspapers’ Web sites, iPad application or Amazon Kindle edition. The rest were occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers, the News Corporation said.

The company’s initiative has been closely watched among media analysts and advertisers because The Times and Sunday Times are among the first prominent general-interest newspapers to start charging for their digital content. Other newspapers are also moving to introduce paid services as online advertising falls short of publishers’ hopes that it might someday replace dwindling print ad revenue.

“These figures very clearly show that large numbers of people are willing to pay for quality journalism in digital formats,” said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, the London-based arm of the News Corporation that publishes The Times papers.

The News Corporation already charges for access to The Wall Street Journal. The company, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, also moved another British newspaper, the tabloid News of the World, behind a pay wall.

The conventional wisdom among media analysts has been that it will be difficult to persuade readers to pay for general news online, given the panoply of free news available on the Web.

But, some specialty publications in areas like business and finance have had modest success with paid access.

The Financial Times, for example, says it has attracted 189,000 paying customers for its Web site, which uses a metered model, giving online readers a limited number of free articles every month before charges kick in.

The New York Times, which also publishes The International Herald Tribune, has said it plans to take a similar approach when it begins charging for its Web site next year.

When the News Corporation switched to a paid model, the company estimated that the number of visitors to The Times and Sunday Times Web sites would drop by 90 percent. In fact, traffic appears to have fallen by somewhat less. Nielsen, the media audience measurement agency, said last week that the average number of monthly unique visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites from Britain had fallen by 42 percent, to 1.78 million, in the third quarter, after the charges were instituted.

Many of those visitors do not go beyond the home pages.

But the News Corporation has said the newspapers will benefit despite drawing smaller audiences, because they can sell more focused advertising, as well as generate new revenue from subscribers.

Jim Chisholm, a newspaper consultant in Lille, France, said the News Corporation’s announcement left a number of questions for advertisers unanswered, including the amount of time that users were spending on the sites.

“Much as we all want newspapers to succeed and make money, in a market as rough and crowded as the U.K., The Times pay wall was always going to be a tall order,” he said.

Another question is what effect the charges are having on the print editions of The Times and Sunday Times. Paid circulation of the daily paper fell about 3 percent from June through September, to about 487,000, while sales of the Sunday paper rose by about half of 1 percent, to nearly 1.1 million.

Analysts say the move to paid-for Web sites could also open up other possibilities for the News Corporation, including bundled sales of online access with subscriptions to British Sky Broadcasting, a pay-television service with 10 million customers. The News Corporation owns 39 percent of Sky and has proposed buying full control.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 3, 2010, on page B3 of the New York edition.

I would like to analyze the following very good, long story running in the New York Times:
Soaring Above India’s Poverty, a 27-Story Home
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: October 28, 2010

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MUMBAI — The newest and most exclusive residential tower for this city’s superrich is a cantilevered sheath of steel and glass soaring 27 floors into the sky. The parking garage fills six levels. Three helipads are on the roof. There are terraces upon terraces, airborne swimming pools and hanging gardens in a Blade Runner-meets-Babylon edifice overlooking India’s most dynamic city.
Enlarge This Image
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

The 27-story house of Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, in Mumbai, India.

There are nine elevators, a spa, a 50-seat theater and a grand ballroom. Hundreds of servants and staff are expected to work inside. And now, finally, after several years of planning and construction, the residents are about to move in.

All five of them.

The tower, known as Antilia, is the new home of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose $27 billion fortune also ranks him among the richest people in the world. And even here in the country’s financial capital, where residents bear daily witness to the stark extremes of Indian wealth and poverty, Mr. Ambani’s building is so spectacularly over the top that the city’s already elastic boundaries of excess and disparity are being stretched to new dimensions.

“One family is going to live in that?” said Prahlad Kakkar, an advertising filmmaker and prominent city resident. “Either it is a landmark, or a symbol, or it is Mammon.” He added: “There is shock and awe — both at the same time.”

Mr. Ambani, his wife, Nita, and their three children are expected to move into the building after a housewarming party with 200 guests scheduled for Nov. 28. For his part, Mr. Ambani has refused to comment about the project and required his designers, decorators and other contractors to sign confidentiality agreements, as if a cone of silence could be erected around a skyscraper rising near the edge of the Arabian Sea.

Predictably, and perhaps by design, the opposite has happened. Details have spilled out — many of them confirmed or disputed anonymously. Some reports have estimated the total residential space at 400,000 square feet, though people close to the project say the real number is a humbler 60,000 square feet. Press accounts also have estimated the value of the building at $1 billion, a figure disputed by people familiar with the project.

Regardless, a gawking city has greeted the new tower with a mixture of moralizing and astonishment, envy and condemnation, all sprinkled with Freudian analysis of the most basic question: Why did he do it?

“We are all sort of perplexed,” said Alyque Padamsee, a long-time advertising executive and actor in the city. “I think people see it as a bit show-offy.”

A bit.

For decades, the Ambani family has been India’s most famous corporate soap opera. The father, Dhirubhai Ambani, was a brazen, rags-to-riches tycoon who established Reliance Industries after rising out of the city’s Dickensian tenements, known as chawls. Today, Reliance is the world’s biggest producer of polyester fibers and yarns and accounts for almost 15 percent of India’s exports, according to the company’s annual report. The two sons, Mukesh and Anil, inherited and divided the empire and have spent years feuding, including a nasty recent fight over natural gas rights that brought a reprimand from the prime minister before India’s Supreme Court settled the case in Mukesh’s favor.

Of the two brothers, Anil is the more flamboyant and outgoing, while Mukesh is regarded as more staid — less likely, at least, to build at 27-story house for himself. The new tower is located on Altamount Road, the same leafy residential street in south Mumbai where the father bought his first home after moving the family out of the tenements. Later, he purchased a 14-story apartment building named Sea Wind, where both Mukesh and Anil have lived with their families on different floors, even during their feud. (Their mother refereed from her own residence in the building.)

Now Mukesh is moving into a tower that makes Sea Wind seem like a guest house.

“It’s kind of returning with a vengeance to where they made it into the middle class and trumping everybody,” said Hamish McDonald, who chronicled the family’s history in his new book, “Mahabharata in Polyester: The Making of the World’s Richest Brothers and Their Feud.”

“He’s sort of saying, ‘I’m rich and I don’t care what you think,’ ” Mr. McDonald said.

Mumbai, once known as Bombay, is India’s most cosmopolitan city, with a metropolitan area of roughly 20 million people. Migrants have poured into the city during the past decade, drawn by Mumbai’s reputation as India’s “city of dreams,” where anyone can become rich. But it is also a city infamous for its poor: a recent study found that roughly 62 percent of the population lived in slums, including one of Asia’s biggest, Dharavi, which houses more than one million people.

Real estate prices are among the highest in the world, pushing many working-class residents into slums, even as developers have brazenly cleared land for a new generation of high-rise apartment towers for the affluent. High-rises are considered necessary, given the city’s limited land, yet the rising towers have further insulated the rich from the teeming metropolis below. With his helipads, which still await operating approval, Mr. Ambani could conceivably live in Mumbai without ever touching the ground.

“This is a gated community in the sky,” said Gyan Prakash, author of the new book “Mumbai Fables.” “It is in a way reflective of how the rich are turning their faces away from the city.”

Along Altamount Road, which is also home to other industrialists, the reaction to the new neighbor is mixed. Some senior citizens along the street worry about the noise from the comings and goings of helicopters. But Utsav Unadkat and Harsh Daga, college students who grew up in the neighborhood, stared up at the tower on a recent afternoon as if it were a dream realized.

“I heard he has a BMW service station inside,” said Mr. Unadkat, dragging on a cigarette (unconfirmed). “There’s also a room where you can create artificial weather,” Mr. Daga added (apparently true).

Standing nearby, Laxmi Kant Pujari, 26, a decorator’s assistant, waited to carry glass samples into the building. If his samples are selected, Mr. Pujari, a migrant, would handle the installation — a task he considered an honor. “Whether it is a beggar or an Ambani, the desire to be rich is in everyone’s heart,” he said.

Farther down the street, Sushala Pawar admitted struggling to comprehend the difference in Mr. Ambani’s life and her own. She cooks for a family in a nearby apartment, earning 4,000 rupees a month, or about $90. She sleeps on the floor of the hallway after the family has gone to bed.

“I’m a human being,” she said. “And Mukesh Ambani is a human being. Sometimes I feel bad that I live on 4,000 rupees and Mukesh Ambani lives there.”

But then, nodding toward the building, she perked up.

“Maybe,” she said, “I could get a job there.”

Don't believe it until you see it is down the tube, again: Erasing Objects From Video In Real Time
| from the no-more-wires-visible dept.
| posted by timothy on Wednesday October 13, @08:09 (Graphics)
| https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/13/0525245/Erasing-Objects-From-Video-In-Real-Time?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Smoothly [0]interpolating away objects in still pictures is impressive
enough, but reader geoffbrecker writes with a stunning demonstration from
Germany's Technical University of Ilmenau of [1]on-the-fly erasure of
selected objects in video. Quoting: "The effect is achieved by an image
synthesizer that reduces the image quality, removes the object, and then
increases the image quality back up. This all happens within 40
milliseconds, fast enough that the viewer doesn't notice any delay."

Discuss this story at:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/10/13/0525245&from=newsletter

Links:
0. http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/08/25/1835256/Content-Aware-Image-Resizing
1. http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/video-voodoo-software-removes-objects-live-video

Assignment for last week was a audio news report sent to me as an e-mail attachment. Trying to get background noise for the audio report to increase the drama of the event.

This is an example of how Journalism may work after the sigularity.
The Science of Truthiness |
| from the look-it-up-in-your-gut dept. |
| posted by Soulskill on Sunday October 03, @08:17 (The Internet) |
| https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/10/03/033241/The-Science-of-Truthiness |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

E IS mC(Square) writes "Researchers at Indiana University have [0]just
launched Truthy.indiana.edu, which they humbly declare 'a sophisticated
new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network
analysis and crowdsourcing to [1]uncover deceptive tactics and
misinformation leading up to the Nov. 2 elections.' According to [2]their
FAQ, they define 'truthy' thus: 'A truthy meme relies on deceptive
tactics to represent misinformation as fact. The Truthy system uses
Truthy to refer to activities such as political smear campaigns,
astroturfing, and other social pollution."

Discuss this story at:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/10/03/033241

Links:
0. http://truthy.indiana.edu/
1. http://www.fastcompany.com/1692072/truthy-colbert-twitter-swift-boat
2. http://truthy.indiana.edu/faq

This is a magazine project from Scandinavia which has one of the best records on democracy and human social service:

Projects
Italian Journalism in the Age of Silvio Berlusconi

What's happened to Italian news media in the last two decades, and what was it like before?
Reporting China

Chinese journalism after market reforms: the possibility and dangers of investigation.
Russian News is Good News

The remaking of Russian journalism, and Russian journalists, in the age of Vladimir Putin.
Independent Journalism in Post-Independence States

The perils and possibilities of holding power to account in different African countries.
The Pipers and the Tunes

A comparative perspective on the power of proprietors, public service and people to influence the content and limits of journalism.
The Peripheral Vision of Central Issues

How good is the coverage of matters essential to public welfare and the public interest? And who cares about it?

Axess Programme on Journalism and Democracy
Submitted by Janice Winter on September 9, 2009 - 9:39 AM
journalist.jpg

The Axess Programme on Journalism and Democracy began in June 2009, born out of the perceived need for a comprehensive study of the relationship between journalism and democracy in the contemporary - and rapidly transforming - media landscape.

Two main issues frame the programme:

* how should journalism serve the public?
* what effect will the changing nature of journalism have on its ability to hold power to account?

The programme consists of a range of projects, based in different parts of the world, which address these issues in differing ways. These include, or will include, projects in China, Russia, Italy, the European Union, Sweden, the UK, South Africa and elsewhere.

In each case the projects will develop an accessible narrative. The aim is to combine a rigorous approach to research with the ability to tell a vivid and illuminating story. The end product of this three-year programme will be a unique, world-wide story of the way in which journalism, democracy and power affect each other.

The Axess Programme on Journalism and Democracy is funded by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation. Its director is John Lloyd.

We invite our readers to submit blogs similar to those posted on the website by our researchers. If you have strong views about journalism and politics that you'd like to share, submit your writing to us by emailing janice.winter@axessjournalism.com
Comments (9)
To all involved in this project

Good luck! It's a huge undertaking, but should prove to be extremely interesting and of immense value.

Posted by Simon Winter on October 8, 2009 - 3:33 PM
Hello -

What a great initiative, it will be interesting to follow.

Wait a minute - good heavens! Where is your RSS feed?

If you really want to chart the "development of the internet" which "is revolutionising the ecology of journalism" you might want to show some grasp of its fundamentals.

Please inform your webmaster about RSS feeds, the most important web technology of the past ten years. And please ask your webmaster to implement it.

Sincerely,

C.L.

Posted by Computer Literate on October 15, 2009 - 6:01 PM
Thank you for the encouragement! We are already onto our webmaster about an RSS feed, so it should be implemented soon!

Posted by Janice on October 16, 2009 - 12:56 PM
Thank you for your quick response. I am looking forward to subscribing to some probing and daring analyses.

Posted by Computer Literate on October 19, 2009 - 2:30 PM
And there it is. Thank you.

Now all you need to do is to provide full-text coverage and image inclusion in your RSS feed - and your site will climb even higher on the accessibility mountain.

Posted by Computer Literate on October 28, 2009 - 5:02 PM
The quality of democracy depends on the quality of the political communication - where mmedia is important. In Stockholms Community PopVox.info is an organization developing a new relation between poltiics and media.

Posted by Peter Ahlm on November 17, 2009 - 4:49 PM
Hi,
How long have you been in this field? You seem to know a lot more than I do, I'd love to know your sources!

Posted by cheap printer ink on Janurary 29, 2010 - 7:16 AM
The quality of democracy depends on the level of education of the constituents. Communication is important, of course, but the more educated voter will be far more capable of reading between the lines in the verbal play that is journalism and politics. A reporter's job, initially, was to report the facts, just the facts, all of it, unpleasant or not and the reader was left to make up his own mind as to the circumstances or intentions of those involved. Then the newspaper industry became big business and started hobnobbing with politicians and other businessmen and these days, it seems, the reporter's job is to sell the paper, paying lip service to readers. The real problem starts when journalists start taking the game of politics so serious that they figure they are best qualified to become politicians. That is when the reader, who is also the voter, will start getting the news the politicians and businessmen want them to know. I recommend reading Terry Pratchet's "The Truth" for his history of the journalist and press. Well worth the real perspective on life.

Posted by X Cepting on February 15, 2010 - 2:09 PM
Democracy depends on communication...do we have to educate ourselves to know how we want to live???? You might need education to understand how educated people is trying to justify their ideologies (religions)!

Posted by Peter Ahlm on February 16, 2010 - 11:51 AM

Next class tell me what this is about and whether it's news or history?

- QUOTATION OF THE DAY -

"It's ironic -- no, it's worse than that, it's appalling -- that, at the same time as the United States was prosecuting Nazi doctors for crimes against humanity, the U.S. government was supporting research that placed human subjects at enormous risk."
- DR. MARK SIEGLER, of the Maclean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, on a
program in the late 1940's to deliberately infect
Guatemalans with venereal diseases, in a test of penicillin.

Who should decide what you need to know? Who should decide what you should eat, wear, look at, listen to, and read?
Most Readers Don't Like Customized News |
| from the you-decide-for-me dept. |
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 29, @17:33 (The Internet) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/09/29/2031251/Most-Readers-Dont-Like-Customized-News |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

An anonymous reader writes "Despite the push by organizations such as
Google and Yahoo!, a recent study found [0]not everyone is a fan of
web-based customization for news. The researchers defined customization
as when the user gets to choose specific topics to read on a daily basis.
Instead, some prefer personalization. This is when the system chooses
content based on a reader's past choices. 'The obvious assumption is
people would like more control over what they read,' Sundar said. 'We
found when it came to evaluating new stories and quality of content,
customization was the preferred method for power users. If you were not a
power user, you wanted the system to tailor the news for you.'"

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/09/29/2031251

Links:
0. http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/66907/20100929/researchers-online-news-google-yahoo.htm

Something more about twitter., which we were discussing int he last class. What is useful about twitter? :from the New York Times - September 30, 2010 12:11 AM
Can Twitter Lead People to the Streets?
Introduction
Twitter and social activismAlexandra Zsigmond

In The New Yorker this week, Malcolm Gladwell offers a bracing critique of the notion that social media like Twitter and Facebook are reinventing activism -- claims that were broadly made after Twitter became identified with protests in Moldova and Iran last year.

"Social networks are effective at increasing participation — by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires," he writes. And the "weak ties" created by these platforms, he adds, cannot promote the discipline and strategy that true political activism requires.

Can social media tools like Twitter nurture political action? What are their limitations and how might that change as social media mature?

You should take a look at this, it's funny. Also look at the next two or three in the list. A very good report on a young journalist in Africa as well as another great report on the New York reporter in South East Asia on beauty:
Video: Op-Ed at 40 | You Better Watch Out
Harvey Fierstein recounts his musings on Santa's sexual orientation.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/playlist/op-ed/1194833176718/index.html?th&emc=th

THIS NEWS WAS PAID FOR BY...
With summer ending, local television news stations recently rolled out their back-to-school features. In 10 big cities, that meant an appearance by a young mother and "toy expert" named Elizabeth Werner.
Werner whipped through pitches for seven toys in just a few minutes. Perky and positive-plus, Werner seemed to wow morning news people in towns like Detroit, Atlanta and Phoenix. They oohed and aahed as they smelled Play-Doh, poked at mechanical bugs and strummed an electronic guitar she brought to the studio.
Though parents might have welcomed the advice, and even bought some of the toys, they probably would have liked to know that Werner serves as a spokeswoman for hire, not an independent consumer advocate. She touted only products from companies that forked over $11,000 (the initial asking price, anyway) to be part of her back-to-school television "tour."
But viewers in several of the cities would have had no way of knowing that Werner's pitches amounted to paid advertising, because their local news stations failed to meet their legal obligation to identify the segments as paid promotions.
Local television news has become a hotbed for pay-to-play promotions. I've previously chronicled how L.A. stations offered breathless stories about City of Hope Medical Center and Ford Motor Co. without telling viewers that the subjects of these "news" stories actually paid to get star treatment.
The trend promises to continue and grow. TV news producers must fill an expanding news hole, particularly in the mornings, where many news programs have been extended from three to four, five and even six hours. And advertisers, fearful of being blocked by viewers with video recorders and mute buttons, don't mind paying for promotional appearances that make them more visible and credible.
The practice goes way beyond Los Angeles and a product or two. Be warned if you are watching a self-proclaimed consumer advocate on local TV news pitching cars, electronics, travel and much more. There's a good chance that your friendly small-screen expert has taken cash to sell, sell, sell.

Look at this:Wikipedia Entry Turned Into Actual Encyclopedia                                              |
|   from the now-how-much-would-you-pay? dept.                                                 |
|   posted by timothy on Friday September 10, @08:03 (Wikipedia)                               |
|   https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/09/10/034201/Wikipedia-Entry-Turned-Into-Actual-Encyclop|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

[0]Ponca City, We love you writes "If [1]journalism is the first rough
draft of history, what does that make Wikipedia? Time Magazine reports
that technology writer James Bridle has created a 12-volume compendium of
[2]every edit made to the Wikipedia entry for the Iraq War between
December 2004 and November 2009. 'It contains arguments over numbers,
differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and
frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes
"Saddam Hussein was a dickhead.,"' writes Bridle. 'This is
historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of
argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always
correct codification.' The books presumably only exist in one copy, so
they are not for sale."

Discuss this story at:
   http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/09/10/034201

Links:
   0. http://poncacityweloveyou.com/
   1. http://www.slate.com/id/2265540/
   2. http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/07/wikipedia-entry-on-iraq-war-turned-into-actual-encyclopedia/

Journalist have to stay on their toes:Journalist Tricked Captors Into Twitter Access                                               |
|   from the 140-characters-of-freedom dept.                                                   |
|   posted by Soulskill on Tuesday September 07, @17:45 (Social Networks)                      |
|   https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/09/07/2110218/Journalist-Tricked-Captors-Into-Twitter-Ac|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

itwbennett writes "Kosuke Tsuneoka, a Japanese freelance journalist held
captive in Afghanistan since April 1, was released over the weekend. His
freedom came a day after he sent two Twitter messages from a captor's
phone. 'i am still allive [sic], but in jail,' read a message sent at
1:15 p.m. GMT on Friday. It was followed a few minutes later with a
second message, also in English, that read, 'here is archi in kunduz. in
the jail of commander lativ.' The message referred to the Dasht-e-Archi
district of Kunduz where he was being held. On Tuesday, speaking in
Tokyo, Tsuneoka revealed [0]how he managed to convince his captors to
give him access to the Internet. 'He asked me if I knew how to use it, so
I had a look and explained it to him,' said Tsuneoka. 'I called the
customer care number and activated the phone,' he said."

Discuss this story at:
   http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/09/07/2110218

Links:
   0. http://www.itworld.com/mobile-amp-wireless/119845/freed-journalist-tricked-captors-twitter-access

The following is a SF fiction report, however, how do you feel about it?  Is this the future of news?:
I’m stood in the middle of a rubble-strewn street in Los Angeles, watching emergency service workers and distraught members of the public dragging battered bodies from the wreck of what was, less than an hour ago, a primary school. Everyone I can see is crying. Everyone but me.
My name is Sally Bowles. I am a journalist.
I know what you think. Well, I can guess. Something like you callous heartless bitch, I expect. How can you not be moved to tears by this tragedy?
I don’t know, to be honest. But there seems to be some limit to the human capacity for the physical expression of grief and sorrow. During my training, and the early years of doing this job, I cried all the time. But it’s as if my tear ducts have lost the capacity to do so – which is ironic, considering they were surgically altered so I never have to blink. Perhaps that’s the cause.
But I still feel the grief, you know. Of course you know – if I didn’t feel something about what I was seeing, the output of my sensorium wouldn’t be broadcast for all comers to plug into from any terminal on the planet or beyond. It’s my ability to feel grief and not act on it that makes me a viable on-the-spot stringer. It’s why you watch through my eyes and brain, even as you despise me for letting you do so.
I struggled with the ethics of it, at first. I still do. I can’t work out who’s being exploited. The victims of natural disasters, bungled terrorist actions and corporate-sponsored civil wars? You, the viewer, sat safe at home sucking down the sights, the stench, and the horrible emptiness in my stomach, vicariously experiencing the worst horrors the world has to offer just so you can feel more satisfied with the life you consistently fail to use to the fullest? Or me, a bleeding-heart liberal trapped in a heartless industry by her bleeding-heart liberalism, loathing what I have to do, loathing myself for loathing it but not quitting? Maybe all of us. Maybe none. I just don’t know.
Speculation isn’t in the job description. Nor is getting involved; I’m only here to allow you to be here by proxy. If you want to get involved - to feel as if you can do something, no matter how fruitless - there are other channels whose cameras are chosen for their inability to stand back and watch. And then there are those other channels – the gloater channels, the fundamentalist channels, the corporatist channels. You can feel any way you want about the news, without having to think for yourself or lift a finger.
I often wonder how well it works, how much detail you get. How accurate are the emotions you receive from me? Do you catch this, my inner dialogue? Do you hear me wrestle with my conscience, feel me searching for some sort of justification for what I do? If you do, do you care? Do you feel the same, independently of me? Do I open your eyes to questions, even as I open mine to the raw experience of disaster and pain?
I don’t know. It feels like I know less every day, and the knowledge is replaced with this void, this aching absence of anything except the gut-punch of horror at the cruelties the world acts out on us – and that we act out on each other.
My communication terminal is vibrating, and over the wailing of sirens and mothers of dead children I can hear the VTOL flying in to pick me up. There’s been a massive mudslide in rural Guatemala, and you’ll all be wanting to see it.

The following New York Times article is a good over view of some of the things that news organizations have to deal with in the present turmoil and crisis in the newsroom.  One of the problems, as always, is that we can easily find out what people want to read.  The bigger problem is what they need to know, but don't find interesting.  The challenge for writers and editors is to find ways to present 'need to know' information in a way that the consumer of news will absorb.  Another question is 'are opinions, ideas, facts, products in the consumer sense of the word?

By JEREMY W. PETERS

Published: September 5, 2010

In most businesses, not knowing how well a particular product is performing would be almost unthinkable. But newspapers have always been a peculiar business, one that has stubbornly, proudly clung to a sense that focusing too much on the bottom line can lead nowhere good.

Enlarge This Image

Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

The Washington Post newsroom displays traffic data. Raju Narisetti, a managing editor, said it helped to decide where to cut staff.

Now, because of technology that can pinpoint what people online are viewing and commenting on, how much time they spend with an article and even how much money an article makes in advertising revenue, newspapers can make more scientific decisions about allocating their ever scarcer resources.
Such data has never been available with such specificity and timeliness. The reader surveys that newspapers relied on for decades took months to produce, often leaving editors with stale data.
Looking to the public for insight on how to cover a topic is never comfortable for newsrooms, which have the deeply held belief that readers come to a newspaper not only for its information but also for its editorial judgment. But many newsrooms now seem to be re-examining that idea and embracing, albeit cautiously, a more democratic approach to serving up the news, particularly online.
“How can you say you don’t care what your customers think?” asked Alan Murray, who oversees online news at The Wall Street Journal. “We care a lot about what our readers think. But our readers also care a lot about our editorial judgment. So we’re always trying to balance the two.”
Editors at The Journal, like those at other large newspapers, follow the Web traffic metrics closely. The paper’s top editors begin their morning news meetings with a rundown of data points, including the most popular search terms on WSJ.com, which articles are generating the most traffic and what posts are generating buzz on Twitter.
At The Washington Post, a television screen with an array of data — the number of unique visitors to washingtonpost.com, how many articles those visitors view and where on the Web those visitors came from — is on display for the entire newsroom. A red or green marker designates each data point, indicating whether the Web site’s goal for the month on that particular metric has been met. About 120 people in The Post’s newsroom get an e-mail each day laying out how the Web site performed in the closely watched metrics — 46 in all.
Rather than corrupt news judgment by causing editors to pander to the most base reader interests, the availability of this technology so far seems to be leading to more surgical decisions about how to cover a topic so it becomes more appealing to an online audience.
The Post, which provided extensive coverage of the recent elections in Britain online and in its print editions, found that online readers were not particularly interested in the topic. One of the five most viewed items on The Post’s Web site in the last year, in fact, was not a political project at all but a piece on Crocs, the popular foam footwear. Editors attributed that to Yahoo, which linked to the article.
But that did not translate into more Croc coverage. And coverage of the British elections was not scaled back.
Raju Narisetti, The Post’s managing editor overseeing online operations, said he saw reader metrics as a tool to help him better determine how to use online resources.
“We ask, ‘What can we do online to make it more attractive?” ’ Mr. Narisetti said. “Can we do podcasts? Can we do a photo gallery? Can we do any kind of user-generated content?”
He said the data has proved highly useful in today’s world of shrinking newsroom budgets. Mr. Narisetti said that when he had to reduce his staff last year, he looked at what kind of content was not performing well with readers. He discovered that long-form video had a low audience, so he reduced that department by a couple of people.
At The Journal, editors use traffic data to inform decisions on how articles should be presented on WSJ.com. “We look at the data, and if things are getting a lot of hits, they’ll get better play and longer play on the home page,” said Mr. Murray. Conversely, articles getting low audiences will be moved down more quickly if there is no compelling news reason to keep them prominent.
But Mr. Murray explained that the data was not always used as a blunt tool. In the case of a rather dry business development last month involving the Potash Corporation, the Canadian fertilizer maker, Journal editors decided to prominently display articles on the subject despite very low traffic numbers.
“We didn’t put it there because it was going to be a big traffic getter. We put it there because it’s big important news in the business world,” Mr. Murray said.
The New York Times does not use Web metrics to determine how articles are presented, but it does use them to make strategic decisions about its online report, said Bill Keller, the executive editor. “We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play,” he said, “because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We’re not ‘American Idol.’ ”
Mr. Keller added that the paper would, for example, use the data to determine which blogs to expand, eliminate or tweak.
As newspaper Web sites use technology to learn more about readers’ habits, they are also developing new ways to persuade readers to tell them more about what they want. The Los Angeles Times features what it calls a “personality quiz” for readers on its Web site. The feature adds a spin to the personalization options that Web sites have offered for the last few years with a 17-question test that asks readers things like “What does success mean to you?” and has them pick from 12 photos. A few options include images of a wedding, a gleaming sports car and a man embracing a peasant child.
At the end of the quiz, readers are assigned a personality type like “dynamo,” who, as the quiz explains, is someone “always seeking new adventures that broaden your horizons and take you out of your comfort zone.” A customized news feed then appears each time a reader visits the Web site from the same computer.
“It helps me understand the readers in a way that I can’t with just the metrics,” said Sean Gallagher, managing editor for online operations at The Los Angeles Times, explaining that he now pairs sports articles with food articles because surveys have shown a correlation.
As the technology advances and allows papers to look more deeply at performance metrics, newsrooms may find that there is just some data they would rather not know.
At a recent meeting with the top online editors of The Los Angeles Times, a consulting group that helps media companies enhance profits from their Web sites pitched new software that it said could change the industry. The newsroom would be able to know how much money — down to the penny — each of its articles online was making when readers clicked on ads.
“I could see a business case for it,” said Mr. Gallagher, who hastened to add, “I don’t agree with that business case.”
Software developers acknowledge that the questions can be difficult as newspapers try to reinvent their business models. But they say the dialogue is ultimately constructive.
“By having this data and making it available, we’re spurring the conversations to take place,” said Tim Ruder, chief revenue officer for Perfect Market, the company that developed the tracking software for ad clicks. “And it’s especially healthy to have those conversations in the context of experience and not in an abstract way.”

A version of this article appeared in print on September 6, 2010, on page B1 of the New York edition.

This is from a military report written for the British Government on what to expect in the future:
Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as "probability-based, rather than predictive".
The 90-page report comments on widely discussed issues such as the growing economic importance of India and China, the militarisation of space, and even what it calls "declining news quality" with the rise of "internet-enabled, citizen-journalists" and pressure to release stories "at the expense of facts".