the newspaper business

What an idiot.

But now that he has hit the terrorists hard by making sure YouTube won’t host any terrorist training videos, Lieberman is back in the spotlight.

YouTube updated its “Community Guidelines” yesterday with a notation telling terrorist cells that if any training videos are uploaded to the service, they’re at risk of violating the company’s Terms of Service and could face permanent expulsion from the site. That should put the fear of God into them.

In response, Lieberman circulated a press release saying that his four months of pressuring YouTube has finally paid off and because of his hard work, YouTube and US citizens are safer today.

CNN has issued a formal written policy which forbids ANY employee from participating in dialogue on the web. This includes NO

• blogging
• Facebook/MySpace
• commenting in forums/chat room
• tweets

WHAT IF I DON’T WORK DIRECTLY WITH NEWS GATHERING OR NEWS REPORTING BUT ELSEWHERE WITHIN THE SUPPORTING DEPARTMENTS OF CNN?
In discussions about this issue with your colleagues across CNN, it was felt by them that it was important to have this policy apply across the board.
WHAT ABOUT FREELANCE EMPLOYEES AND INTERNS?

Supervisors should make sure freelancers and interns read this policy now — or on their first day going forward — and commit to following it.

The catch phrase that keeps repeating is “on which CNN might report.” Very broad and probably unconstitutional, don’t you think?

If you don’t follow this policy, and you are officially a CNN employee, the loss of objectivity won’t just apply to you, but could be associated with CNN.

Did I give up my right to protest or vote when I started working for a newspaper? I hope not.
Many newspapers are actively encouraging reporters to take up blogging.  Newspapers invite reporters to express opinion in the print editions. Newspapers have long held that as long as the opinion expressed is marked clearly as that of the reporter, it is acceptable.
Life would be simpler if every employee was an Eloi to the Morlock employer.

In case you hadn’t noticed, there is some serious blogging going on which is being threatened.

Bug Girl writes a very entertaining blog - yes, about bugs. I ran across one of her posts by “stumbling” or following a tag or some other random way.
She’s been in my RSS reader since a long time ago. I don’t understand a lot of what she writes, but there is always some fun stuff in her posts.
But she may quit!
She may quit because she might get sued.

Neurodiversity is a science blog run by one woman with a passion for neurology and science. And now she’s been served with an order to turn over all her financial records, all correspondence with fellow bloggers, and a host of additional personal details, just because she blogged about a topic related to the case.

And she links to this site that explains more about the legal thuggery.

If you “stumble” or “digg” posts, please visit the link above and give it your push. This legal thuggery needs to see the light of day and feel the heat of public outrage.

(crossposted)

I don’t want to say that Chrysler LLC vice chairman sounds like Fox News Circus Clown in Residence. I have a lot of respect for Jim. But when asked about the economy and market volatility and plummeting consumer confidence, Jim suggested that the best thing folks could do is “stop reading the newspapers.“

(Emphasis mine)

So auto buyers read newspapers. He thinks newspapers are persuading people not to buy cars.
Taking him at his word, wouldn’t it make sense for car makers to advertise heavily in newspapers?

Can somebody explain how this logic is flawed?

A budding journalist is kvetching about the fact that Gannett wants to buy a college newspaper in Ft. Collins Colorado.

Student news outlets are designed to be independent voices for the campuses they serve. Having corporate management, which is one of the possibilities currently being talked about for The Collegian, would destroy the nature of the student-news industry.

He asks a number of questions, but the heart of his post is how can a college newspaper be independent when owned by a “media-conglomerate.”

I don’t know the details in Ft. Collins, but the newspaper probably gets some funding from the college, either directly, or indirectly from the college charging some kind of fee to the students.

It seems to me that young Vogts has misread the situation.

Here’s how I see it: the newspaper is currently answering to a master who has no motivation or compunction to preserve a free press on campus. OTOH, Gannett practices their dedication to a free press everyday.

As far as the financial aspects of which is better - getting money from a college (or it’s students) or getting money as a well run business. That’s an easy answer. Every state is under pressure to spend education wisely. Many lawmakers would suggest that running a newspaper that is often critical of the college and/or the government, is an expense that is unnecessary.

One more point regarding the hazards of being owned by a “media conglomerate.” While it is true that many media companies decimate acquisitions to meet the debt payments, Gannett has demonstrated this is not their modis operandi.

I think every college newspaper would be better off with ownership that has no financial ties to the college or university it covers.

The days of writers becoming journalists because of a love of writing and a desire to change the world is ending. Including television, not just print. Television news has been taken over by the beauty queens.

Here’s a writer that is struggling with her future. Her post was based on a Forbes article which she didn’t link to but quoted from on her blog. Here are here feelings. 

If I didn’t feel obsolete before, that pretty much did it. Yet I’m still craving this career that will never pay well, never be the same and never get the respect it used to deserve. This really isn’t news. I know that my career is threatened by so much right now. And it’s dying a slow death. I knew that after college. But still. I try to hope…

She asked, “what now? Teach?”

My answer is no, learn. Learn to think multi-media.

• Learn to shoot a digital still camera well. This is a skill that can be mastered. It doesn’t require the motor drives and SLR’s of a professional. You won’t be shooting moving targets, you will be shooting scenes or people.
• Learn to shoot video. Not television quality. But “good enough” quality. Learn how to pan smoothly. Learn not to zoom. Learn about backgrounds and closeups. Learn what can be done with good editing.
• Learn to record audio. Natural sounds and sound bites that can be added to a slideshow to create a great experience for the reader.

Quality writers will always be in demand. Quality writers with a multi-media outlook will be in higher demand. But certainly somebody told you that you’ll never get rich in the newspaper business. So there still has to be the passion to realize you are fulfilling a mission that is so important it is written into the constitution.

In an op-ed piece some heads of Journalism/Communications schools advocate the government require TV and radio stations to carry more news if they are to retain their license to broadcast.

“The F.C.C. ought to treat a broadcast licensee’s commitment of resources to original local reporting on public affairs as a key factor in its decisions about regulatory issues,” the deans said. “Companies should be required to make a persuasive case that they will increase their commitment to local reporting if they get what they want - whether they aspire to own broadcast properties and newspapers in the same market; or, thanks to the onset of digital television, to turn every channel they control into several channels; or to expand their national market share in broadcasting or cable television.”

Here are the illustrious ivory tower dwellers that advocate more government control over the news and the airways. (It’s just so ridiculous to write that statement!)

• Roderick P. Hart, dean of the University of Texas journalism school;
  
• Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy;
  
• Thomas Kunkel, dean of the University of Maryland journalism school;
  
• Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School;
  
• John Levine, dean of the Northwestern journalism school;
  
• Dean Mills, dean of the University of Missouri journalism school;
  
• David M. Rubin, dean of the Syracuse school of public communications;
• Ernest Wilson, dean of the University of Southern California school of communication.

 There is an old saying: the freedom of the press belongs to those that own the press. Another one is, don’t argue with people who buy their ink by the barrel.

Blogging has changed that and Jay Rosen, a journalism assistant professor at NYU, has outlined specific instances where bloggers shined light into dark corners until the main stream media picked up.

With blogging, an awkward term, we designate a fairly beautiful thing: the extension to many more people of a free press franchise and the right to publish your thoughts to the world.

-more- 

There are large protests in Venezuela. So what you may ask. Those Latin American are always in the streets protesting something or other.

Here’s what makes this protest unique: they are protesting the loss of one of the freedoms we enjoy and take for granted.  The freedom of speech.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened to shut down the country’s last opposition television station as students took to the streets for a third day, protesting what they say is a crackdown on free speech.

Chavez said he had “no fear” of criticism he might face for closing Globovision, a 24-hour news channel that he accused of trying to instigate his assassination. The threat follows the May 27 shutdown of Radio Caracas Television, Venezuela’s most- watched TV network.

It makes me wonder how far our government could go before Americans took to the streets. There are columnists, bloggers, radio talk show hosts and TV talk show hosts that would be happy if National Public Radio went away.  They would be happy if the New York Times and other major metro newspapers went away.

What would it take to move you to the streets in protest? If the government took CBS off the air?  How about NBC?  CNN? ABC?  Would you like it if Fox News was the only source for television news?  What if the Washington Times was the only newsaper in our nation’s capitol?

How about limiting access to MySpace.com and Youtube.com?

It’s not just schools that are trying to limit access to such sites. The federal government is currently considering legislation that would restrict access in public libraries as well, unless the student has parental permission.

What if Western Kentucky University shut down a newspaper critical of the administration.

In June 2005, the full 7th Circuit ruled 7-4 in Hosty v. Carter that a school official at Governors State University in Illinois was not liable for effectively shutting down the Innovator, the student newspaper that had published several articles critical of the school administration.

 Freedoms are taken away slowly.  What would it take for people to move to the streets to protest the loss of freedom of speech?  I hope for all our sakes, it doesn’t happen.

In our democratic system governed by the rule of law, government must be accountable to the citizenry for its policies and actions. Under our constitutional system of checks and balances, Congress can impose a direct check on executive action by oversight and legislation. But citizens can do so only indirectly, either by voting the president out of office or by invoking the powers of the courts to review executive action. For either approach to work, citizens must know what the executive branch is doing, must have the right to go to court to challenge unlawful actions, and must have judges willing to compel the executive branch to obey the law.

David C. Vladeck
Associate professor, Georgetown University Law Center