Over at ZDNet, David Berlind takes a deeper look at the transparency issue. He notes a posting that included an MP3 audio link of a key interview he did for the story. It’s a fine idea.

In an ideal world I’d like to have had access to a full transcript as well, because I a) can read faster than I can listen; and b) I can quote more easily from text than audio. But that’s asking a lot, partly because it’s not cheap to get transcripts. Maybe someone will create a transcript of the audio file and post it somewhere else.

The Pentagon posts transcripts of major interviews with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and has for some time. For example, there’s this one.

But when people do this, they should be consistent. The Pentagon deleted a section in a Washington Post interview, and the Post promptly posted its own transcript containing the missing lines. The Pentagon cost itself some credibility in this case, after gaining it with its prior transparency.

The spectacle of George W. Bush and his friends celebrating (Reuters) his election so expensively this week is one of those revealing moments in history. The announced spending of $40 million just on the parties is undoubtedly less than the actual amount, but even if it’s accurate it’s a staggeringly high number in such a time when even a tiny bit of sobriety would have been appreciated.

Meanwhile: Soldiers in Iraq still go without sufficient supplies. The tsunami survivors are just starting to pick up their lives. African warlords slaughter their people. America’s middle class continues to shrink toward insignificance. And so on.

An inauguration is an event that celebrates the best of America: the peaceful transfer of power when a new president takes office, and the continuation of the republic’s stable form of government on all cases, including the one this week when the president gets another term. And no one begrudges an appropriate demonstration of joy by the victors.

What Bush and his allies are doing is just plain vulgar, particularly in wartime. They have no sense of proportion, as they’ve demonstrated so many times before. But this is over the top. Bush’s press secretary says the object of this over-the-top scene is to “celebrate freedom.” No, it’s a mockery.

The WSJ fell into what I call the “lazy equivalence” trap in this story today about two bloggers who got paid as consultants by the Dean presidential campaign. The article seeks to connect these payments with the vastly more serious Armstrong Williams payola scandal, in which the Bush administration paid the right-wing commentator more than $240,000 to promote an education policy.

There’s are differences, big ones. Such as: One of the bloggers shut down postings when he moved to Vermont to join the campaign, and the other prominently (on his homepage) disclosed that he was consulting. Williams and his backers did not disclose anything until USA Today outed his conflict of interest. And the Williams affair involved the White House itself, not merely a wannabe candidate for the office. You and I — taxpayers — got the bill for this sleaze.

(Glenn Reynolds writes much more on this, and makes some good points. He also links to all of the players, who respond to him and each other.)

The question of overall ethics is important, however, and we all need to focus on it. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Marks gives me more credit than I deserve in this Many to Many posting, where he notes the traditional journalistic model of going for an exclusive scoop. He says some journalists are thinking how to make stories more inclusive: “measuring success by how many people they bring into the conversation, and they recognise it doesn’t necessarily start with them.”

This was with most of the things I used to work on when I was writing a regular column. I was writing about people, issues and organizations after the news had already come out — trying to put it into perspective with my own take on the topic.

But I also hungered for the scoops. And when I got something all by myself, which happened periodically, I loved the feeling.

This is a valuable part of journalistic competition. It is surviving the shift we’re seeing from Big Media dominance to a more synergistic system including the rest of us. Scoops will continue to occur — though they’ll take different forms, and the scoop will last for about five minutes before it spreads widely — and that’s a good thing.

Meanwhile, the involvement of more people in the conversation is the big, and most important, shift of all. This definitely doesn’t start with us, or end with us. It continues, and grows.

I’m happy to report that the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society has named me as a Fellow for the upcoming year. The center has been doing important work in understanding how law intersects with the online world, and I hope to spend some serious time in the next few months on key issues.

One such issue is copyright. The entertainment cartel seeks to ban or control technologies that might be used for infringing purposes even when those technologies, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, have entirely legitimate purposes. P2P is an absolute necessity for grassroots journalism’s survival, as are other technologies that are now or may soon be in jeopardy from these attacks.

Another big issue is defamation. Bloggers have no more right to defame people than mass-media journalists, for example; we are responsible for our words. We need to help people understand what’s legitimate and what’s not.

But bloggers and other grassroots journalists typically have far fewer resources to fight back when unfairly treated, such as a baseless libel suit or other legal action that is designed to — or has the effect of — attacking free speech.

Led by Robert Cox, the new Media Bloggers Association (I’m a charter member) has been working on this already. It’s launching a Legal Defense Fund for bloggers, a good first step. Grassroots media could be stifled if we don’t figure this out.

I hope to pull together a day-long conference at Stanford later this year, bringing in experts in copyright and First Amendment law, grassroots journalists and others who care about this subject. If you might want to be part of this or help sponsor it, send me an e-mail at.

Jay Rosen asks why (scroll down) I used the word “smarter” in a recent posting about the CBS News debacle, in which I said, in part: “It would have been smarter for CBS to thank, not make semi-snide remarks about, the bloggers who raised the important questions about the authenticity of the memos. But you can’t have everything.”

Like many other people, I wish that CBS would take to heart the grassroots developments in our craft. That would have been wise (and smart).

But I don’t think CBS is, today, institutionally capable of truly understanding the value of listening to its audience — of grasping how much help the audience can be in the journalistic process. The network’s offhanded dismissal of the grassroots continues even now. (I know there are individual people at CBS who do get it. But they are not running things.) Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog, the Guardian’s Simon Waldman has published an important essay, “The Importance of Being Permanent,” in which he talks at length about why it’s so important to keep links alive on the Web. Sample:
Permanence means understanding that when you put something on the Web it should be there for ever: ideally in the same place for perpetuity. It means that if I link to it now, someone else can follow that link in two days, two weeks or two years’ time. (I’m not going to lay out the business models in this piece, but I’m not excluding the possibility of pay-to-view; it’s the position that counts, not the price.)

This is an alien concept to many people in the news industry, which creates work designed to appear in a particular place at a particular time. But permanence is critical to understanding the real challenges and potential for online publishing.
Terrific stuff, and everyone in the news business should read it.

In a thought-provoking blog posting, Mitch Ratcliffe discusses the ever-relevant topic of journalists and their conflicts of interest. But he goes off the rails briefly when he says: “Bloggers simply haven’t had enough time to fuck up as royally as those who have been granted First Amendment protection for a couple centuries.”

I understand what Mitch means, but I want to remind everyone that it isn’t just journalists who’ve enjoyed free speech through American history. We all have, here in America.

The First Amendment does mention the press — and thank goodness that it does. But in a time when the lines are blurring between journalists and the rest of us, remember that freedom of speech (and religion and the right to peaceful assembly, etc.) belongs to everyone. It is the foundation of liberty.

Dave Winer asks some questions in the wake of my posting about Bill Gates’ recent interview, in which Gates called people who want balance in intellectual property laws “communists.” (Dave calls them “neo-communists who want musicians to give their work away,” so if I understand him correctly he agrees with Gates on this, even though that language largely misrepresents the beliefs of people who are trying to restore copyright fairness.) Read the rest of this entry »

New York City is about to ban “unauthorized” use of cameras in the subways, as per this rule (170k pdf):
1050.9.c. No photograph, film or video recording shall be made or taken on or in any conveyance or facility by any person, except members of the press holding valid press identification cards issued by the New York City Police Department or by others duly authorized in writing to engage in such activity by the authority. All photographic activity must be conducted in accordance with the provisions of this Part.
The absurdity is pointed out by a local photographer in a story in today’s NY Times. She says:
“The bizarre bureaucratic mind somehow thinks a terrorist needs to be standing there with a visible camera to figure out a place to put a bomb, when obviously technology has reached a point where tiny little video cameras can have eyeballs peering out from your buttonhole.”
And, of course, the rule makes the increasingly bogus distinction between amateurs and professionals.

To those who will now say in the comments that the NYC officials are only doing what’s necessary to combat terrorism, I have a question. What about the thousands upon thousands of subway pictures already out there? As the Times story notes, the proposed photo ban coincides with new books and exhibitions of, yes, subway photos.

I don’t doubt that some officials believe they’re making life just a wee bit harder for terrorists, and therefore that the ban must somehow be acceptable. The bureaucratic mind today is paralyzed with being the scapegoat after the next attack on our soil, which is inevitable.

There’s no serious risk assessment going on here, largely because technology makes it just about impossible to stop people from taking pictures for whatever reason. Worse, this rule is a step toward something that should worry all of us. When journalists need licenses — when people need the government’s permission to ask the kinds of questions journalists (and concerned citizens) ask every day, the government has new kinds of power.