Category: Media

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Content Ratio

Pretty amazing visual study at Daily Kos on hard news content in American media. A reader took a screenshot of CNN’s homepage, then removed all advertising and promotional content. From what remained, he then removed all the “fluffy” news. Links to hard news stories that remained make up a sliver of the total screen real estate. Then he tries the same with the homepage of China’s chinaview.cn — hmmm… nothing to strip out — it’s all hard news (but is it trustworthy news?)

There’s something to be said for state-run media. Take the money out of the news equation and the content ratio rises (c.f. PBS vs. commercial media). On the other hand, check out how Iranian government censors take a pen to cartoon and advertising images in imported magazines in that country.

You want the frying pan, or you want the fire?

Music: Susannah McCorkle :: Quality Time
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Chronicle Reporter Statement

A federal judge has sentenced two SF Chronicle reporters to 18 months in prison for refusing to betray sources in their coverage of the BALCO case. Lance William’s statement to the court is worth reading. Excerpt:

They demand that I give up my career and my livelihood — for if I betray my sources, I cannot work any longer in investigative journalism, work that requires above all the ability to keep confidences. … And now we have reached a time in our country when the prosecutors say they have the power whenever they choose to subpoena reporters and make them government witnesses, and that they are going to exercise that power. Judge, I despair for our Free Press if we go very far down this road. Whistleblowers won’t come forward. Injustices will never see the light of day. Our people will be less informed and worse off.

At the end of the day, a judge has to weigh the benefits to the public of gaining critical evidence for a particular case on one hand and of upholding values that are critical to a free society on the other. We allow hate groups to assemble because the right to assemble and speek freely is a paramount concern, and this case weighs a similar tension. But I think this judge is failing to clearly see the far-reaching consequences of his decision. Open this door and you’ve removed a brick from the wall of free press.

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Jay Rosen

I’m participating this semester in a class on citizen journalism being taught by Dan Gillmor and Bill Gannon, editorial director of Yahoo! News. The class grows out of the new Center for Citizen Media, which is based at the J-School. A great list of speakers lined up for the semester; tonight was Jay Rosen, Associate Professor at NYU’s Department of Journalism and who runs the PRESSthink blog.

Took some loose notes tonight as he spoke about the transformation of distribution mechanisms from one-way to two-way, and how the read/write web will (slowly, painfully) change the way journalism is produced.

———–

There was no such concept as “public opinion” in the 17th century… before the press. What’s the relationship between the press and the public? The atmosphere of the public sphere in the internet age is so different from that under which the old press grew up.

OLD:
One way
One to many
Read only

NEW:
Two way
Many to many
Read/write

Continue reading “Jay Rosen”

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Distortumentary

Amid the coming week of 9/11 tributes, ABC is preparing to air a piece slamming the Clinton administration for his role in the years prior. “Path to 9/11” is created by “an avowed conservative who has spoken on a panel entitled ‘How Conservatives Can Lead Hollywood’s Next Paradigm Shift.'” Remember, we’re heading up to mid-term elections here.

According to reports from those who have seen it, the “docu-drama” is also riddled with factual errors. Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has already debunked one of the film’s central scenes — involving Sandy Berger — as completely false.

Apparently Rush Limbaugh likes it — the film was screened in advance only to conservative bloggers and journalists. ActForChange is running a petition to get the documentary pulled before it airs on national TV.

Music: National Health :: The Bryden 2-Step (For Amphibians) [Part 2]
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Live Logging

Nifty WordPress plugin lets you view activity on a WP blog in real time: Live. Watch RSS access, comments, misc visitor activity in a little Ajax window as it’s happening.

In a similar vein, discovered Apache Log Tail the other day — integrates with cPanel’s WHM and lets you view tail activity for each domain on a cPanel server in real time – really useful during comment spam attacks, etc. (and way easier / more compact / more visual) than running tail from a shell). Also a big fan of the same developer’s vpsinfo and loadavg scripts.

Music: The Ramones :: Loudmouth
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State of the Blogosphere

David Sifry (Technorati) has posted the latest numbers on the State of the Blogosphere. Staggering.

About 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second … As of July 2006, about 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day … Today the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.

At what point will it become unusual for someone not to have a blog?

Music: George Harrison :: Bangla Desh
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WP-Digest

Tired of banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why WPBlogMail (which sends weekly Birdhouse email updates to subscribers) would choke on 3rd-party WP plugins (but only when run via cron). Plus I wanted to pull digests via lynx, rather than handling everything manually in PHP (lynx –dump has some great formatting options). And I hated the name. Finally decided it was time for an entirely new architecture for the system, so started work on WP-Digest.

Continue reading “WP-Digest”

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News21

Got pulled off my regular job a couple months ago to work full time on the Carnegie-Knight “Initiative for the Future of Journalism,” an aggregate effort by five of the top journalism schools to revamp and renew approaches to journalism, and ultimately to transform the way journalism is taught.

As part of the planning for the initiative, the five participating deans drafted a vision for change that seeks to renew the mission of schools of journalism much the same way that schools of business, medicine and law have renewed themselves at different junctures in history.

Online now is a starter/brochure site, and currently all of the advance reportage is happening through external blogs. But a compadre and I (yes, we have two webmasters at the jschool now!) have been hard at work building a custom content management system* to meet the project’s fancy multimedia and nested template needs — the largest pure programming job I’ve ever been involved with, and the first time I’ve done any kind of team programming — a very satisfying experience. We’ll be rolling out the “official” site on top of our CMS later this summer. For now, the reporting fellows are scattered all over the globe, gathering material.

The project was recently blogged at Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media, at Boing-Boing and also at Utterly Boring, though the interesting stuff is yet to come, once the story packages are completed by the fellows and we wrap up the CMS.

* Will have to post separately sometime on the old build vs. buy CMS question.

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Tyger

Salon on Guilherme Marcondes’s beautiful Tyger:

“Tyger” is a dazzling animation by Guilherme Marcondes, created for an annual festival thrown by the British Council in Brazil. The only requirement was that it reference English culture in some way, so Marcondes chose William Blake’s “The Tiger” for inspiration. Marcondes writes on his Website that he loves the poem because it “gives us a hint of wonder along with a fear of progress.” We love this short, which had us wondering aloud, What immortal hand or eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?