future-of-journalism

http://minimediaguy.org/2006/02/dress_rehearsal.php

Posted by Tom Abate on February 24, 2006 08:05 AM | Permalink
at his blog: "MiniMediaGuy: A conversatoin about new media business
models." Tom Abate is a business reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle.

tabate@sfgate.com
(415) 777-6213

Dress Rehearsal

I'm warming up my thought processed for my appearance this coming Thursday
at the New Communications Forum in Palo Alto, where I will appear on a
panel that discusses the difference between journalists and bloggers.

It seems to me the place to begin is by defining journalism, which
includes gathering and presenting details of wars and political
controversies, disasters and heroic acts, crime and social movements,
sporting events and celebrity antics, hobbies and cultural trends,
business and scientific developments and all the many things that invite
interest, alarm or curiosity.

But there is some other connotation to journalism, a sense of mission or a
higher purpose, clearly not always achieved, that once earned the press
the title of the Fourth Estate.

It is in this light that I would like to think about the differences
between journalists and bloggers, and those mainly boil down to the
obvious: journalists are paid, have health plans, special access and
privileges and work in highly structured organizations that have codified
rules of behavior. In the best instances these rules encourage trust on
the part of the public. But that trust may be eroding. And the
bureaucratic inertia that infects all large institutions makes the
traditional Fourth Estate slow to embrace new media tools and thinking --
and creates an opening for bloggers.

As for bloggers, they run the gamut from a few hugely successful sites
like Talking Points Memo and Instapundit, to literally millions of hobby
blogs that stigmatize the entire blog movement as the domain of ranters
and ravers. And while a middle tier of blogs are rising -- as alternatives
to trade press or as online culture zines -- that are powerful enough to
threaten the status quo, for the most part even the best blogs are small
businesses -- with all the challenges that implies.

I will suggest that the differences between journalists and bloggers are
not so important as thinking about how to accomplish the higher mission of
journalism. In an advertising-supported environment how does any media
undertake the unpopular and difficult issues? I'll have some thoughts
about how the people we now call bloggers should rename themselves
something along the lines of personal publishers -- and add some thoughts
about how these small businesses can create the systems that will enable
them to make a living -- and a difference.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
'Cause if you ain't Mass Media, you're Mini Media

// posted by newshare @ 11:33 PM

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/bal-bz.to.media28feb28,0,216161.story
Originally published February 28, 2006

61% get local news from newspapers

By Nick Madigan
Baltimore Sun reporter

People looking for local news still tend to reach for their hometown
newspaper, but television and the Internet continue to draw away
significant numbers of readers, according to a national survey being
released today.

A survey by the market research business Outsell Inc., which echoes other
recent studies, determined that 61 percent of consumers look to their
newspapers as an essential source for local news, events and sports,
followed by television (58 percent) and radio (35 percent). About 6
percent turn to the major Internet search engines for local news and
information.

The survey of 2,800 consumers' news habits found that television is
consumers' top choice for national news. Seventy-one percent of
respondents said they rely on network, cable and satellite TV as primary
or secondary sources of national news. Thirty-three percent choose their
local newspapers first or second for coverage of national events, followed
by 28 percent who access sites such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL News.
Eleven percent of consumers are relying regularly on their daily
newspapers' Web sites, the survey said.

Consumers, the study found, "prefer the Web as the best route to news and
information about health, personal finance and travel."

In addition, it said, the "interactivity and personalization afforded by
the Internet" has not only cut into newspaper readership but has weakened
the link between reading and shopping, which ultimately costs publishers
money.

"It's going to be really interesting to see whether newspapers are going
to be able to capitalize on the Internet from a financial point of view,"
said Rachel Smolkin, managing editor of American Journalism Review. "Even
as newspaper circulation is declining, we're seeing readership increases
in newspaper Web sites. It's not that readers aren't interested in news."

In a recent Harris Interactive poll of 2,985 U.S. adults, 75 percent of
those surveyed said they watch local broadcast news and 71 percent said
they watch network news.

The Harris poll also found that 64 percent of people get their news by
going online and that 54 percent listen to radio news broadcasts, 37
percent listen to talk radio and 19 percent listen to satellite news
programming.

A third poll found that as the pace of modernization has accelerated
worldwide, so has computer use and access to the Internet. The Pew Global
Attitudes survey found substantially more people using computers and going
online than in 2002.

And the poll found that although Internet users in 2002 were predominantly
younger people, the growth rate for adults older than 50 has outpaced that
for young adults in the United States and Western Europe.

AUTHOR's EMAIL: nick.madigan@baltsun.com

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This article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

// posted by newshare @ 4:42 PM

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/02/26/ING5RHE19P1.DTL
Sunday, February 26, 2006

Press is growing meeker: Still powerful but with less respect

By Evan Cornog
Publisher, Columbia Journalism Review

It was Thomas Carlyle, a British historian of the 19th century, who
popularized the term "fourth estate" in reference to the press. Carlyle
credited an earlier man of letters, Edmund Burke, with the phrase, saying
that Burke had observed that in addition to the "three estates"
represented in Parliament -- king, lords and commons -- there was a
"fourth estate," the press, more powerful than them all.

This notion of the power of the press is a popular one among American
conservatives (although if the press is as liberal as they claim, it is
hard to reconcile that notion, and the idea of the press's power, with the
current Republican ascendancy in all branches of the federal government).
Another testimony to the power of the press is the way that reporters have
become targets of violence by both sides in the Iraq conflict. Scores of
news people have been killed since the war began, and they continue to be
prime targets.

But if the press is powerful, it seems not to be well respected. Jayson
Blair, the Dan Rather report on President Bush's Texas Air National Guard
service (or lack of it), and other sins and stumbles of what bloggers call
the MSM (mainstream media) have sapped the profession's reputation, and
the more recent fiasco surrounding James Frey's fictionalized "memoir," "A
Million Little Pieces," provoked the apologetic outrage of the nation's
empathy-in-chief, Oprah Winfrey.

If journalists are currently unpopular, they are not ignored. I can recall
no time when the news media were so central to the national conversation.
The latest evidence of the centrality of the news media to our current
state of affairs is the fact that two of the five films nominated for Best
Picture in this year's Academy Awards are bio-pics of journalists,
"Capote" and "Good Night, and Good Luck."

The story of Truman Capote's strenuous pursuit of the story of the murder
of a Kansas family in his book "In Cold Blood" provides a rich portrait of
the journalist as anti-hero, and Capote's intellectual seduction of his
most important source, the murderer Perry Smith, walks a fascinating line
between infatuation and cynicism.

Capote's despair when Smith and his fellow criminal, Dick Hickock, are
granted a stay of execution, thus postponing the longed-for conclusion of
Capote's magnum opus, is brilliantly rendered. But the portrait Philip
Seymour Hoffman gives of Capote as a bribe-giving, insinuating and
duplicitous man (he lies to Smith about the book's title, which he knows
will upset his prime source) hardly paints a bright picture of
journalists.

In contrast, "Good Night, and Good Luck" presents a worshipful picture of
one of the classic heroes of American journalism, the CBS broadcast icon
Edward R. Murrow. The bad guy is the oily red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy.

In the film, Murrow is the embodiment of that liberal media figure of
conservatives' nightmares -- and, indeed, Murrow's combative style was
nothing like the dexterously cautious tone of the so-called mainstream
media today. Murrow launches a crusade against what he sees as McCarthy's
bullying, and helps to put the bully in his place, in spite of the
possible (and actual) costs to him, his friends and CBS. The film
overemphasizes Murrow's role in defeating McCarthyism, but Murrow's
reports on McCarthy really did exemplify what Carlyle meant by the press's
potential to function as a fourth estate.

Today the press is perhaps more timid, but it has grown even more central
to the distribution of power in America. This year's Oscars testify to a
national concern with the role of the press in our society. It may be that
the two phenomena are inextricably linked -- that the press' growing
importance has required it to rein in its earlier, crusading spirit.

Is that a good thing, or not?

Evan Cornog is publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review and associate
dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He wrote
this article for the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. Contact us at
insight@sfchronicle.com.

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This article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

// posted by newshare @ 7:20 PM

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/17/business/web.norris.php

Floyd Norris: Anybody want to buy a paper?

By Floyd Norris International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2005

There is a venerable Wall Street joke featuring an investor who, having
accumulated a large position in an illiquid stock, decides it is time to
get out. ''Yes, sir,'' replies the broker when he is told to sell. ''To
whom?''

The current situation of Knight Ridder, the owner of such newspapers as
The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald, brings back that joke,
albeit painfully.

The investor is a hitherto successful money manager named Bruce Sherman,
whose Private Capital Management invests money for wealthy individuals and
institutions.

Starting in 2000, he saw value in newspaper stocks, and at last report his
clients owned $4.2 billion worth of shares in nine newspaper companies.
That is about one-tenth of the total stock issued by those companies and
15 percent of the $30 billion Sherman manages.

He is the largest owner of seven of those companies, with 15 percent of
The New York Times Co., publisher of this newspaper; 26 percent of Belo,
publisher of The Dallas Morning News and The Providence Journal, and 38
percent of McClatchy, whose papers include The Sacramento Bee and The
Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Founding families control those companies through super-voting stock.

But Knight Ridder, where his stake is 19 percent, has no such stock. After
Sherman warned he might support a bid to replace directors, Knight
Ridder's board agreed to put the company up for sale.

Sherman's problem is one known by many an investor who looks for cheap
stocks: Where he sees value, others see problems. The consensus Wall
Street view of newspapers now is that they are a dying breed, destined to
wither under relentless competition from the likes of Google.

Profits may be good now, but they will not last, as circulation declines
and advertisers seek newer media. An index of newspaper stocks is down 22
percent in 2005.

Money managers are required to file quarterly reports of holdings, but not
of purchases and sales. I estimate, based on those filings and assuming
trades were made at average prices for each quarter, that in the four
years through the end of 2003, Sherman's clients made about $600 million
in newspaper stocks.

Unfortunately for them, he kept buying after the shares peaked, and since
then they have lost about $1.2 billion, for a net loss of $600 million.

Newspaper stocks are not the only place where he is now bucking
conventional wisdom. Last week he reported owning 10 percent of Eastman
Kodak, the photo giant struggling to adjust to a digital world. He has
accumulated those shares since late 2003, and so far his investors are
down about $100 million in that stock.

Over the last decade, his investors did twice as well as those who bought
the stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500, but in the last year they have
lagged behind the index. It is now managing about four times as much money
as it was in 2001, when Legg Mason bought it and began marketing it to
customers. A strategy of owning about 150 stocks, many of them relatively
small, worked when he was managing a few billion dollars but now leaves
him in positions that are hard to get out of if he changes his mind.

Sherman did not agree to be interviewed for this column, and the company
did not comment on my estimates. But it is clear that he cannot get out of
his newspaper investments unless others come to see value where he does.

And that is where the auction process comes into play. Perhaps private
equity companies will see an opportunity to buy and break up Knight
Ridder. Perhaps other media companies will bid. The quality of news
provided to millions of Americans may depend on who buys, and on how they
manage, the papers.

Knight Ridder's plight also reflects the fact that Wall Street is not
always nice to those who do what the Street demands. Analysts called for
aggressive cost cuts and increased share repurchases, and Knight Ridder
complied, in some cases angering employees and creating public
controversies over whether news coverage would suffer. Investors showed
their lack of gratitude by sending the stock to a three-year low last
month.

Anyone want to buy a newspaper? Sherman certainly hopes so.

There is a venerable Wall Street joke featuring an investor who, having
accumulated a large position in an illiquid stock, decides it is time to
get out. ''Yes, sir,'' replies the broker when he is told to sell. ''To
whom?''

The current situation of Knight Ridder, the owner of such newspapers as
The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald, brings back that joke,
albeit painfully.

The investor is a hitherto successful money manager named Bruce Sherman,
whose Private Capital Management invests money for wealthy individuals and
institutions.

Starting in 2000, he saw value in newspaper stocks, and at last report his
clients owned $4.2 billion worth of shares in nine newspaper companies.
That is about one-tenth of the total stock issued by those companies and
15 percent of the $30 billion Sherman manages.

He is the largest owner of seven of those companies, with 15 percent of
The New York Times Co., publisher of this newspaper; 26 percent of Belo,
publisher of The Dallas Morning News and The Providence Journal, and 38
percent of McClatchy, whose papers include The Sacramento Bee and The
Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Founding families control those companies through super-voting stock.

But Knight Ridder, where his stake is 19 percent, has no such stock. After
Sherman warned he might support a bid to replace directors, Knight
Ridder's board agreed to put the company up for sale.

Sherman's problem is one known by many an investor who looks for cheap
stocks: Where he sees value, others see problems. The consensus Wall
Street view of newspapers now is that they are a dying breed, destined to
wither under relentless competition from the likes of Google.

Profits may be good now, but they will not last, as circulation declines
and advertisers seek newer media. An index of newspaper stocks is down 22
percent in 2005.

Money managers are required to file quarterly reports of holdings, but not
of purchases and sales. I estimate, based on those filings and assuming
trades were made at average prices for each quarter, that in the four
years through the end of 2003, Sherman's clients made about $600 million
in newspaper stocks.

Unfortunately for them, he kept buying after the shares peaked, and since
then they have lost about $1.2 billion, for a net loss of $600 million.

Newspaper stocks are not the only place where he is now bucking
conventional wisdom. Last week he reported owning 10 percent of Eastman
Kodak, the photo giant struggling to adjust to a digital world. He has
accumulated those shares since late 2003, and so far his investors are
down about $100 million in that stock.

Over the last decade, his investors did twice as well as those who bought
the stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500, but in the last year they have
lagged behind the index. It is now managing about four times as much money
as it was in 2001, when Legg Mason bought it and began marketing it to
customers. A strategy of owning about 150 stocks, many of them relatively
small, worked when he was managing a few billion dollars but now leaves
him in positions that are hard to get out of if he changes his mind.

Sherman did not agree to be interviewed for this column, and the company
did not comment on my estimates. But it is clear that he cannot get out of
his newspaper investments unless others come to see value where he does.

And that is where the auction process comes into play. Perhaps private
equity companies will see an opportunity to buy and break up Knight
Ridder. Perhaps other media companies will bid. The quality of news
provided to millions of Americans may depend on who buys, and on how they
manage, the papers.

Knight Ridder's plight also reflects the fact that Wall Street is not
always nice to those who do what the Street demands. Analysts called for
aggressive cost cuts and increased share repurchases, and Knight Ridder
complied, in some cases angering employees and creating public
controversies over whether news coverage would suffer. Investors showed
their lack of gratitude by sending the stock to a three-year low last
month.

Anyone want to buy a newspaper? Sherman certainly hopes so.

// posted by newshare @ 2:40 PM

We will view a Media Giraffe inteview with Meena Trott later in the
semester.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2006/id20060224_155318.htm

FEBRUARY 24, 2006

Innovation Q&A
The Future of the Blog

Six Apart's Mena Trott helped start the stampede by co-designing user-friendly software. But she thinks the blogging trend is only just beginning.

It's hard to imagine the world without blogs. The publishing technology has become a cultural and political force. One of the reasons for the rapid growth of the blogosphere is the existence of user-friendly blogging software such as Moveable Type. The program was designed with simplicity in mind by Mena Trott, a former graphic designer and early blogger (she launched dollarshort.org in early 2001), and her husband, Ben Trott, a programmer.

Mena and Ben went on to found Six Apart, the San Francisco-based company behind the blog-hosting service TypePad. In January, 2005, Six Apart acquired LiveJournal, an online community of personal blogs that today boasts 9.6 million accounts and more than 16,000 new posts per hour. In December, 2005, Six Apart and Yahoo! (YHOO) announced a partnership to build Yahoo-hosted blogs with Moveable Type.

Six Apart is currently working on a new product, codenamed Comet, that will start beta testing this quarter. "It's meant for the next generation of blogs," says Mena Trott, without revealing details. Just before setting off for Monterey, Calif., to speak at the annual TED conference -- that's technology, education, and design -- Trott spoke with BusinessWeek Online reporter Reena Jana about challenges in blog design -- which, she hints, Comet will attempt to address. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation:

Q: What do you see as the next big issue in blog design?

We'll focus on the idea of more select and filtered readership, and how to allow people to read certain posts. That to me is interesting: how different people want different views of the blog. A big issue right now is how to take that idea in account when designing blogs. Another new challenge is the trend toward adding a lot of assets. People are adding photos, video, and music to supplement the text. How do you make it possible for bloggers to present as much as they want to present without creating blogs that are too cluttered or confusing?

Q: Do you think that blogging will supplant mainstream news Web sites and other established media?

There will be similarities. But blogging and traditional journalism play by different rules and will remain distinct. They're meant to complement each other, play off of each other in terms of the readers' attention. What do I read when I wake up? I go to news sites. But I'm more excited right now about personal users. The 10 blogs I really care about are written by my friends. I'm interested in the community of a blog network.

Q: Even if you don't think that blogs will supplant traditional news media, don't you think they have had an impact?

I think the biggest impact of blogs on mainstream journalism is the presence of a more personal voice. The popularity of the personal tone used by bloggers has caused traditional media to realize it's O.K. for some reporters to use "I." And now many mainstream news media outlets are now incorporating blogs on their Web sites. It makes sense. A reporter's or editor's blog provides a way to include details that might not make it into an official article or TV report -- and a strong sense of personality or identity associated with that journalist.

Q: What aspects of blog-software do you believe can be improved?

I think blog tools can get easier to use. Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail. I foresee the next versions of blog tools as focusing less on features that appeal to early adopters. They'll be easier for people to incorporate more media and maybe mobile capabilities. This will be important, because many more mainstream users will come to blogging. I believe the interest in blogging is just starting.

Q: And are there specific design challenges that you're focused on?

The design of the blog really influences how and if people post comments. One big challenge today is that blog tools come with default templates. So we ask ourselves, what template design appeals to the largest number of people? What are they comfortable using? As a designer of templates, you have to keep in mind that people will see the template over and over again, but need to realize that it's not same person's blog. So it's important to design simple and bare-bones templates. Blogs need to be accessible-looking. It would be great to offer more decorative templates. But it's important to present blogs where you can focus on content and context.

Q: What blogs do you read regularly?

I check out the LiveJournal blogs of about 30 friends. I like Nick Denton's Gawker and his other properties. But I tend to read fun gossip, the equivalent of an Us or a Star magazine. Gofugyourself is one that I find entertaining -- it features celebrities wearing ugly outfits.

Q: Are there any common misperceptions about blogs that you would like to debunk?

Most people think of blogs as being primarily political or tech-focused. To most people, the important things they want to learn about have to do with people they know. So I think personal blogs are really the future, and with that comes a challenge for blogs to be more friendly and welcoming. Also, blogs are all about capturing and preserving information about our lives. And that makes me think of what might be the biggest future blog-design challenge: How do we design blogs that will archive and present 20 years worth of content?

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The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

// posted by newshare @ 8:22 PM

The co-author of a book about the invention of the World Wide Web -- the graphical, browser-based interface which caused the previously text-only Internet to take off -- will speak to the "Future of Journalism" seminar on Thurs., March 23, at 7 p.m., in Bowman Room 101 at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Great Barrington-based author/journalist Mark Fischetti was the professional writer who helped Tim Berners-Lee write the book "Weaving the Web" (Harper Collins, 1999). Berner-Lee is the British-born computer scientist credited with writing the code that launched the first "web browser." He did so while a researcher at a Swiss physics laboratory.

Fischetti says Berners-Lee wrote the non-technical book because the inventor wanted to document what he had in mind when he create the web interface, and his visions for how it might be used. In his March 23 talk, Fischetti will compare what Berners-Lee wanted -- and predicted -- for the web when he developed it in the early 1990s to what exists today and what may be coming.

For example, Berners-Lee wanted the Web to be two-way -- with pages and content as easy to write as to read. Initially pages were not readily editable. But in the last year, "wikis" have become prominent as a form of "read-write" web, and blogs, which allow easy posting and commenting, are a phenomenon.

Mark Fischetti is a veteran science writer, a contributing editor to Scientific American, and is currently issue editor for Scientific American Mind, a new magazine about the brain and mind. He has written for The New York Times, Smithsonian magazine, Technology Review, and many other publications.

His 2001 article, "Drowning New Orleans," in Scientific American predicted the widespread disaster that a hurricane like Katrina would impose, and described comprehensive projects that would save the Mississippi delta. After Katrina hit he appeared as an expert on CNN, NBC's "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert, the History Channel, NPR News, and international media. He has just published "Protecting New Orleans" in Scientific American, February 2006, which presents engineering solutions to protect New Orleans and the delta from future storms.

Fischetti has a physics degree and is co-author with Elinor Levy of The New Killer Diseases (Crown, 2003), which included early warnings about bird flu, and of Weaving the Web (HarperCollins, 1999), written with Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web.

He is a former managing editor of IEEE Spectrum, the world's largest engineering and technology magazine. His 2002 article, "Why Not a 40-mpg SUV?" in Technology Review exposed how far-greater fuel efficiency coud be built into the nation's vehicles, a realization that in 2006 is finally becoming widespread.

Fischetti has edited or ghostwritten a half-dozen other books, and has twice served as the Attaway Fellow in Civic Culture at Centenary College in Louisiana, in 2003 and 2006.

// posted by newshare @ 3:58 PM

At the last paragraph of this story, you find the potential for a
confrontation between Google and the Chinese government. Google says it
won't block availability of its uncensored, Chinese-language search engine
in China.

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/21/AR2006022101844.html

Chinese Media Assail Google
Internet Giant Said to Face Probe for Operating Without License

By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 22, 2006; Page A09

BEIJING, Feb. 21 -- A state-run newspaper reported Tuesday that Google
Inc. is under investigation for operating without a proper license in
China and quoted an unnamed government official as saying the Internet
giant needs to cooperate further with the authorities in blocking "harmful
information" from its search results.

The report, in the Beijing News, was published the same day that another
state newspaper ran a harshly worded editorial about Google. The paper
accused the firm of sneaking into China like an "uninvited guest" and then
making a fuss about being required to follow Chinese law and cooperate in
censoring search results such as pornography.

The unusually bold attacks in the state media suggest that the Chinese
government is unhappy with Google's efforts thus far to filter politically
sensitive results from its popular search engine in China, and that its
ability to do business in the country may be in jeopardy.

Google's cooperation with the Chinese government in censoring the Internet
has already sparked outrage from free speech advocates and U.S. lawmakers
who accuse it of betraying its corporate motto, "Don't be evil." The firm
announced last month that it was launching a censored search engine,
Google.cn, to improve its service in China, where its regular site and its
search results are sometimes blocked.

Dubbed the "eunuch edition" by some Chinese Internet users, the new search
engine withholds results from Web sites the governing Communist Party
finds objectionable, and returns limited results when users enter
politically sensitive keywords.

Google has defended its decision to launch the censored site, arguing that
people in China can continue to use the Chinese version of its regular
search engine, Google.com. It has also pointed out that the new search
engine is the first in China to inform users when results have been
removed because of the government's "laws, regulations and policies."

But it appears Chinese authorities are now pressuring Google to cut off
access in China to its regular search engine, and to stop telling users of
the new site every time a search is censored.

"Is it necessary for an enterprise that is operating within the borders of
China to constantly tell your customers you are following domestic law?"
said the editorial published Tuesday in the China Business Times, a
financial daily.

Both the editorial and the Beijing News accused Google of operating its
new site without an ICP -- or Internet content provider -- license. The
editorial also accused Google of starting a debate about censorship in
China to draw attention away from its "illegal" activity. "Can Google get
away with this?" it asked.

In a written statement, Google spokeswoman Debbie Frost said Google uses a
license held by a local Chinese firm, Ganji.com, in an arrangement that is
common for foreign Internet firms in China.

A source familiar with the government's position said the Ministry of
Information Industries has raised the ICP license issue to put pressure on
Google to comply with its demands. He said the government wants Google to
make a larger investment in China and do more to censor its search
results.

"The main problem isn't the ICP dispute, but the awkward relationship
between Google and the Chinese government," the source said. "To be
honest, the ICP dispute is a minor thing, and that's not what will get
Google into trouble."

Another Chinese source said Google recently rejected an urgent request to
remove from its stored Web pages information related to an internal
dispute at an influential Chinese agency. That information had been posted
on the Internet.

"Foreign-invested search engines must strengthen control and management of
how they handle search results with Chinese information," an unnamed
government official was quoted as saying in the Beijing News.

He said blocking "harmful information" from search results was a "very
practical problem," and added that Google "still needs to strengthen
cooperation with the government's relevant functional departments" in this
area.

The Beijing News also quoted an unnamed Google official as saying it was
"very likely" that all Chinese searches on its regular site would be
redirected to the censored search engine because of "pragmatic
considerations."

But in congressional testimony last week, Elliot Schrage, Google's vice
president for global communications, appeared to rule that out. "We will
not terminate the availability of our unfiltered Chinese-language
Google.com service," he said.

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This article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

// posted by newshare @ 11:48 AM

This is an essay by Bill Bennett, a Williams grad and Republican, and Alan
Dershowitz, a Harvard professor most would call progress. It raises a great
topic for discussion tonight -- if you were an editor, would have printed the
Muslim cartoons? We'll find them on the net tonight and discussion.

Go to this link. I'll have hard copies of the essay, too.

http://www.freepress.net/news/print.php?id=14031

// posted by newshare @ 11:00 AM

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.sacticket.com/tv_radio/story/14214381p-15040442c.html
PUBLISHED: Feb. 21, 2006

Media Savvy: No room for news
Today's tech-savvy youths lack an appetite for traditional media

By Sam McManis
Sacramento Bee Staff Writer

Among her circle of friends at California State University, Sacramento, Sasha Krongos might be considered something of a freak. She, like, follows the news. Not obsessively, mind you. The 19-year-old sophomore from Fortuna has a life, after all. But she makes a habit of leaving CNN on while she gets ready for school. And when her Yahoo home page pops up, she'll usually click on the link to news headlines. But newspapers? Not so much. Too time-consuming and, besides, you have to pay for them.

Radio? Nah - she's got her iPod. And local TV newscasts? "Only at night when I'm trying to fall asleep," she says. "I try to pick up little things, here and there, about the news. I'm a social science major, so maybe I'm different," Krongos says one recent afternoon while hanging out at the student union. "But my friends just don't care. I'm always surprised when they don't know stuff."

Krongos doesn't fault her friends, though. Rather, she blames the mainstream media for failing to connect with people of her generation. "All they think we care about is entertainment news," she says. "Yes, I'm a sucker for pop culture. But the media directs the actual news toward older people."

Well, what about CNN - her primary news source? The network recently elevated Anderson Cooper, 38, to be its main anchorman in a push, network executives say, for the coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic. No go. "To college students," says Krongos with a smile, "he is definitely not young."

Reaching younger news consumers - people just like Krongos - is widely seen as the biggest challenge for media today. Study after study shows that young people (teens and 20-somethings) are ignoring the news in alarming numbers. But alarming to whom? Well, the news organizations, of course. But it also should be a societal concern, says David T. Z. Mindich, a former CNN producer and author of "Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News" (Oxford University Press, $20, 192 pages). Mindich's argument: Our very democracy hinges upon an informed citizenry plugged in to current events. "How do you hold the government and its leaders accountable if you don't follow the news?" Mindich asks. "There's always been a segment of the population that will never follow the news. The problem is that the numbers have increased a lot in the last 30 or 40 years."

A 2005 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that young people spend 6 hours and 21 minutes per day using media - 3 hours and 51 minutes of it watching TV. Yet, only 6 percent of respondents said they watched the news. And numerous other surveys show that although young people log on to the Internet often, they don't use it to get news. Likewise, newspaper readership among youths has fallen steadily since 1972, as has viewership of network TV news and magazine readership. As a result, the so-called mainstream media, which include daily newspapers such as The Bee, have responded with a number of initiatives.

The Bee, as has almost every metropolitan newspaper, has significantly bulked up its online presence. It posts news on its site, sacbee.com, throughout the day and features a regular pop music podcast. Network and local TV news have responded, as well. ABC's "World News Tonight" launched an afternoon Web cast with anchorwoman Elizabeth Vargas. NBC anchorman Brian Williams has a blog dealing with the news-selection process. CBS News has begun a feature, "Assignment America," in which viewers pick one of three story ideas for correspondent Steve Hartman to report. (One viewer choice in early February: Do-It-Yourself Funerals.) All three major Sacramento TV news stations provide streaming video of news stories on their Web sites, and Channels 3 and 10 recently started offering content that can be downloaded for a fee onto consumers' cell phones.

Other, more radical, approaches are being tried elsewhere. Gannett, the country's largest newspaper chain, publishes youth-oriented tabloids in a dozen markets. Chicago had a commuter tabloid war between RedEye (from the Tribune) and Red Streak (from the Sun-Times), before Red Streak folded in late December. The Associated Press has launched "asap," a package of print stories and audio downloads aimed at the 18-to-34 demographic. So far, asap editor Ted Anthony says, 235 newspapers subscribe to the service.

"This is a direct response to the newspaper industry's attempt to attract his audience," Anthony says. "We want to find a way to drag (young readers) either back to the newspaper or get them to look for the first time at the newspaper's Web site. "Text and photos, which was the default way of telling stories, is not necessarily the best way anymore."

Is all this working? Well, when two dozen local college students were interviewed for this story, many said they felt they were talked down to by mainstream media. "It's more interesting for me to log on to (Internet) forum boards and see what other people ... are saying about current events than listen to a report on the news for two minutes that isn't very informative at all," says Taylor Wang, a 23-year-old senior at UC Davis.

Avi Ehrlich, a senior journalism major at CSUS, put it more bluntly: "We get exactly what we want when we want it instead of somebody deciding for us what we need." Still, those in the media aren't ready to write off young people. They continue to grapple with the reasons why a generation (some say two generations) is just not "consuming" news.

But their frustration shows.

"They totally don't care," says Michael Rosenblum, a TV producer and New York University professor who in August helped launch the Al Gore-spearheaded "Current" digital cable channel, which is aimed at younger viewers. "They are so thoroughly disconnected to the news that there's no intellectual foundation upon which to build. "I have 350 students at NYU, a good school. They are smart. But they have no sense of history or what's news. There's a disconnect between the realities of their lives and what the news presents."

Kevin Krim, manager of the blog Livejournal, which has more than 2 million users, says the fragmentation of information sources has only made it more difficult to reach youths. "These kids are a hyper-connected, multitasking crowd with five IM windows open at once, the TV going, a video streaming on their laptop and their homework book open," Krim says. "How do you compete with that?"

Another obstacle, says Jim Morris, executive producer of Channel One (a newscast played in schools nationwide), is that young people haven't learned to differentiate between serious news products and opinion blogs, or even gossip sites. "To many kids on the Internet, sacbee.com is equivalent, news-wise, to the Entertainment Tonight Web site," Morris says. "The difficult task for mainstream media is how to make the news relevant to to them." Convergence of "information delivery systems," says Morris and others, may be what stops the circulation bleeding and ratings drain.

"Young people are less interested in quote, the news, unquote, but remain extremely interested in information," says Ellin O'Leary, executive director of Youth Radio in Berkeley, which produces segments for National Public Radio as well as content for print outlets and the Internet. "They're coming up through a tremendous information revolution. They're mixing media and formats." Therefore, at Youth Radio, student workers are no longer trained in just one medium, O'Leary says. "The next generation of media producers will be more versatile," she says. "We used to train our people sequentially - radio, then Web, writing, then add TV and music later. Now, they're introduced to all of it as soon as they walk in the door."

The AP's Anthony is putting that theory into practice with the wire service's new project. "Maybe a certain story will best attract readers of any age, but particularly that (18-to-34) demographic, in a two-minute audio form," he says. "They have two minutes to listen in their busy schedules." Indeed, young people say they simply don't have time to sit through a 30-minute TV newscast or to read the newspaper cover to cover.

"I barely have time to eat in the morning," says Yasmine Bikul, a junior at CSUS. "I go from school to work to homework. I don't have the time to pay - what is it, now? - 50 cents for a paper. I have my computer. I can flip onto the Net and get information there."

The numbers don't bear that out, however. Only 11 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds surf the Web for news, according to a 2002 Roper Global Geographic Literacy Survey. And a recent Pew Internet and American Life report showed that young people ranked news consumption a distant sixth in their Web-usage habits - well behind e-mailing, instant messaging and interactive blog sites such as MySpace and Livejournal.

As for where they go online for news, young people seek out non-journalistic Web sites, such as Yahoo, America Online and Google, to get a Cliff Notes-type of information, with news links and video clips on demand. Some "vlogs" - seemingly as ubiquitous as pop-up ads - scooped mainstream media in coverage of the Indonesian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. The most popular Web "news" sites, such as Rocketboom.com (100,000 downloads daily), mix humor and esoteric content with topical reports. And shows such as TV's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" are going over well with younger people.

"I can't watch some news stations that are monotone and dry," says UC Davis senior Kristen Gunther, 22. "I can't learn through osmosis if I fall asleep." Which explains the success of Rocketboom, which is entertaining, opinionated and doesn't try to be comprehensive, says producer Andrew Michael Baron. "We are open and transparent about our biases," Baron says. "When you watch the news, or even listen to news commentary on TV, the people who are talking tell you that they are the experts and that they know that what they are saying is true."

Alan Weiss, executive producer of "Teen/Kids News," which is beamed into school classrooms, says young people don't want a voice of authority. "The way we do it is to have the news presented by someone their age," Weiss says. "That gets their attention and keeps them from feeling like they're being lectured to."

Where does that leave mainstream media?

"The media companies that survive are the ones that converge and blur," predicts Bob Papper, a professor at Ball State University in Indiana who has analyzed media use by people of all ages. "For instance, someday, newspapers will just be boutique subsets of news Web sites. And TV news will see more traffic on the Web than on the tube."

The American Press Institute recently began a $2.25 million initiative called "Newspaper Next," to advise print publications about dealing with the competition from "new media." "It's too early to say it's too late for newspapers," says Stephen Gray, a former newspaper publisher and editor who is the managing director of the project. "But you ignore it at your peril."

Gray advocates so-called "citizen journalism," in which community members report on hyper-local events (Little League games and church picnics) filtered through the news organization's editors. And, because of the 24-hour time lag for the print medium, that means delivering that news online and directly to electronic devices. "If I'm an editor or publisher, instead of the old view of 'I'm responsible for a newspaper,' the new view should be, 'I'm responsible for this territory we consider our own and everyone in it,' " Gray says. "I don't know if you're ever going to persuade this Generation Y group to pick up a paper. But if you do it in a content they use - mobile, a discussion site, a weekly magazine - you might connect with them."

By the same token, Morris of Channel One says you won't get young people to watch TV news unless it involves a give-and-take. "It's two-way communication - they demand instant feedback," Morris says. "It's a hook to get them into a story. Otherwise, you lose them. It's that way for me. " I'm a journalist, and if I can't get my kid interested in news, who
can?"

INTERESTED IN THE NEWS?

Percentage of respondents who "definitely" or "generally" agree with the
statement:

"I need to get the news (world, national, sports, etc.) every day," by
age.

18-24: 31.5%

25-34: 38.9%

35-44: 46%

45-54: 52.3%

55-64: 62.1%

65-plus: 68.3%

Source: DDB Needham Lifestyle Survey, 2000; from "Tuned Out: Why Americans
Under 40 Don't Follow the News," by David T.Z. Mindich

About the writer:
"Media Savvy" by The Bee's Sam McManis runs Tuesdays in Scene. He can be
reached at (916) 321-1145 or smcmanis@sacbee.com.

----------------------------------------------------------------

This article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

// posted by newshare @ 8:26 AM

"Network neutrality" refers to the idea that the networks which carry Internet and other broadband traffic should be content neutral. Time-Warner cable, for example, shouldn't have the right to refuse to carry bits-and-bytes from Disney because they compete with a Time-Warner content property.

Paul Riismandel, a communication-studies graduate student at the University of Illinois C-U, has since 2000 written a website called "mediageek", which now includes a weekly audio podcast. His latest -- Feb. 10, 2006, does in 30 minutes an excellent job of describing the issue, and includes snippets of Feb. 7, 2006, congressional testimony.

This is a critical issue for the future of journalism. If content providers have to worry about whether what they produce is going to be blocked by the pipe owner, that is a chilling form of conformity and prior restraint. If we get to the point where a handful of companies control all the pipes into the nation's homes, how easy would it be for a U.S. president to make a few phone calls to key executives, threaten punitive regulation or withholding of some key approvals, to get those pipe owners to block or penalize politically non-mainstream thought?

A.J. Liebling once wrote: "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." In the digital age, if a handful of companies own the virtual "presses" -- the fiber optic cables that carry digital content, what becomes of "free press"? How do ensure open pipes? By competition, or by regulation? One or the other -- perhaps both.

HERE IS A PAGE DESCRIBING Rissmandel:
http://www.mediageek.net/?page_id=1303

Here is his written description of his podcast:
http://www.mediageek.net/?p=1346

Here's the jump page to the MP3:
http://radio.mediageek.net/?p=164

And here is the MP3 download itself:
http://www.mediageek.net/sound/2006/mg021006-64k.mp3

-- Posted by Bill Densmore / click below to add a comment

// posted by newshare @ 10:24 PM

The author, editorial-page editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, is the brother of Steve Satullo, who works at the Clark Art Institute and formerly owned Either/Or Books in Pittsfield. He is a Williams College graduate.

ORIGINAL
URL: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/13905873.htm

03/19/2004 02:46 PM EST

Posted on Sun, Feb. 19, 2006

Center Square Take bull by the horns

By Chris Satullo

Dick Cheney despises me. Well, not me in particular - though I'm confident he would if he got the chance. He despises my type - mainstream journalist. His settled opinion is that we are slimy barnacles on the Good Ship United States, vicious parasites of no redeeming value, lower than the belly of a snake in a wagon rut, lower even than a bucket of whale puke on the ocean floor. We are, in sum, senseless blots on the escutcheon of humanity.

In the wake of last weekend's hunting accident, people keep harrumphing that the vice president erred in not issuing a statement on the night of the mishap. Actually, he issued a very blunt statement. His silence said to the national press: "You are scum, and I don't have to tell you anything." The norm for an elected official in such a circumstance used to be: Round up your press people, give them the facts you have, let them rustle up the other needed info and issue a prompt statement in your name to the usual outlets: Associated Press, etc.

But as Jay Rosen notes on his excellent media criticism blog, PressThink, the reason Cheney didn't do that wasn't distress or embarrassment. It wasn't a mistake. It was, Rosen argues, a considered decision: "Non-communication has become the standard procedure, not a breakdown in practice but the essence of it."

The Bush White House views the press as a noisy, noisome special interest group out only to inflict wounds and make dough. It scoffs at reporters' self-flattery that they play a constitutional watchdog role for the republic. Not only does Cheney reject the press as stand-in for the public, he doesn't believe he owes voters any account of what's he doing, in private or public time, beyond what he deems they need to know. When he finally deigned to appear on Fox News (natch!), he dismissed the furor over his stonewalling as elite pique that he broke the news to a local paper that "understands" hunting. (Even in distress, the guy knew how to speak in red state/blue state code to The Base.)

The vice president sought to provoke and David Gregory of NBC News played into his hands. Gregory's rude outburst at White House evader-in-chief Scott McClellan provided new grist for the liberal-media-bias mills that grind 24/7 on the Internet.

When is the national press corps going to get the message from Cheney et al.? OK, you despise us. You are never going to tell us squat, never going to play by the old rules. You wish we'd go do something anatomically impossible to ourselves. So, reporters, why keep playing along with staged rituals like the White House press briefing? Why cram yourself into rows like schoolchildren, raising your hand to ask questions that a press secretary or president will evade with weary condescension, leaving you only the option of theatrical crankiness to show you're "tough"? Face it, the only real value these rituals have is to provide fodder for Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. They have as much to do with real journalism as a Harlem Globetrotters game has to do with the NBA Finals.

And they are a trap. This absurd play-acting is all most Americans see of the practice of journalism. The setting is designed to make reporters look churlish and impotent. This bolsters the conservative view that reporters are impudent hacks, and the liberal delusion that if only reporters asked the really tough questions, W. would break down like a suspect on Law and Order, sobbing, "Yes, yes, I lied and people died!"

Never going to happen. So, press corps, why not meet unprincipled disdain with principled disdain? Don't even bother showing up. Don't play your debilitating role in the farce. Leave the questions to the planted sycophants; pick up the obligatory spin-quote from the C-Span feed. Spend that time doing the real reporting that many of you do when the cameras aren't on. Go out and uncover, for example, the connection between the savaging of the student loan program and the political largesse of Sallie Mae. Explain why FEMA still can't tie its shoes, how politics hijacked the faith-based initiative.

Actually, those stories have been well-reported in print in recent days. But most Americans didn't see them. Instead, they were invited to believe that the high farce of David vs. Scott is what watchdog journalism is about. And that does journalism, and the nation, no good.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Chris Satullo was named editorial page editor of The Inquirer in March 2000. He's been with the paper 15 years, previously working as deputy eitorial page editor and deputy suburban editor. He is the founder and director of the paper.s Citizen Voices program, an effort to engage readers in deeper political dialogue. He has won more than 25 awards for columns, editorials, newswriting and newspaper design. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, he is a graduate of Williams College and spent a year teaching in France on a Fulbright Fellowship. Contact him at csatullo@phillynews.com. (215) 854-4243.
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This article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

// posted by newshare @ 11:08 PM

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.whotv.com/Global/story.asp?S=4515444&nav=2HAB
Posted on the WHO-TV site (Des Moines, Iowa)

Des Moines, February 16, 2006 - To many of people over the age of 30, 'Blog' is a foreign word, but it's probably part of your child's vocabulary. That's because millions of teens and college students blog everyday. It's like a diary or journal, but in the case of a blog the information is immediately published on the internet - accessible to anyone who logs on. The question is 'What are the consequences of blogging?' The number of students registered on blogs is astounding. The director at ISU's School of Journalism checked into it. He found of the nearly 26,000 students, more than 20,000 are registered on Facebook.com.

Anyone with a computer and a password can read a blog. That includes police, potential employers and college administrators. Two popular sites for bloggers are Myspace.com and Facebook.com. Some bloggers post their names, addresses, phone numbers and even pictures that sometimes show the blogger in compromising situations. Some bloggers also keep a journal. Some entries describe daily activities, while others might be characterized as cries for help. Now some colleges and universities are taking a look at these blogs. Some are restricting use and access to blogs. Educational institutions have also leveled charges against students based on information obtained from blogs. There is even an instance of a student being expelled for making threats through a blog. On Thursday, a group of Drake students met with administrators to talk about how to handle blogs.

// posted by newshare @ 8:19 AM

IF YOU GO TO THE ORIGINAL URL ON THIS
THERE IS A GROWING LIST OF RESPONSES -- WE'LL DISCUSS SOME
OF HIS IDEAS IN CLASS WHEN WE GET A CHANCE -- BILL

URL: http://dodgerthoughts.baseballtoaster.com/archives/321081.html

Your Blog Is Showing

2006-02-17 09:19

by Jon Weisman

So there's all kinds of talk this week about the establishment starting to blog, from Peter Gammons and Jayson Stark on ESPN to the new Inside the Dodgers house blog, hosted by team public relations guru Josh Rawitch, historian Mark Langill and vice president of scouting and player development Roy Smith. And meanwhile, bloggers like myself and Alex Belth have been writing for the establishment. What gives?

It was inside of two years ago that I was still embarrassed by the word "blog," and now it's as if Oprah has made it her Word of the Month. Perhaps the newest mainstream media blogs are a sign of the inevitable jumping of the shark - but it's possible we're witnessing a truly transformative moment in journalism. We're at the point where we no longer need to define the word "blogging" for the uninitiated - although it's clear to me that not everyone agrees on what it means - as much as we need to come up with a good word that stands for mainstream writing. "Non-blogging?" "Columnizing?" "Burnishing your cat?"

Despite the crossover, there's definitely a difference between the two. When I write for SI.com, I try to stay fun, but my style does become a bit more formal. This comes partly out of consciousness of a wider audience that doesn't know me as well as some of you; it comes partly from just the glare of being on a larger stage. SI.com didn't hire me as a blogger, they hired me as an occasional columnist. I'm talking to you - at you - not initating a two-way conversation. There is no comments section for you to respond and no chance for me to write short follow-ups to the orignal piece (though I create those options back here on Dodger Thoughts). As exciting as the SI.com job is for my present and future, it feels a little like a step back into the past.

Something tells me that there are a couple of unsolved mysteries about the future integration of blogging and mainstream media. One is whether instant feedback - instrinsic to many blogs - will be manageable at the most widely read places. Another is whether there will be a full triumph of informality - the same way that men no longer wear fedoras to the ballpark and women don't mind a thong or bra strap peaking out from their clothes.

The challenge is for that informality to serve a purpose, to not be a crutch for mere irresponsibility. What's important for writers is whether they give you something of value that you are encouraged and enabled to comprehend and contemplate, not necessarily how they deliver it. Blogging has been a pathway toward that goal for me, and it looks like it will be for others - even 40-year journalism veterans. As long as there are newspapers, where blogging is impossible, non-blogging will remain. But blogging, rather stunningly, has proven its mettle as a writing style.

I'm left wondering this: For those of us writing online, for SI.com or ESPN.com or NYT.com or whatever, should we be blogging or non-blogging? If you grant that we are capable of applying the rigorous standards of non-blogging to blogging - interview the appropriate people, research, fact-check, engage, entertain, think - what do we gain by not doing so? All things being equal, is one approach superior? Maybe we just need to blur the lines even further, eliminate the distinction between blogs and non-blogs, and just write in the style that feels right for each given article.

----------------------------------------------------------------

The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

// posted by newshare @ 8:16 AM

The unwinding of the CBS "Memogate" provides context for the future of
journalism. The story broke because of blogger activity. The investigation
that led to Dan Rather's reassignment and the departure of CBS producers,
was demanded by bloggers.

You have watched the interview with John Hinderaker (you can listen to it
again as an MP3 if you like from):
http://newshare.typepad.com/mediagiraffe/2006/02/audio_conservat.html

You have the handout of the Democracy Now! interview with Mary Mapes and
the Washington Post story wrapping up the whole affair. Now for an
assignment, please post your thoughts:

1) Were the documents fakes? How do you know? Who do you believe?

2) If the documents were fake, but the "truth" is that Bush's military
record is newsworthy for reasons illustrated by the documents, fake or
otherwise, does it matter?

3) Do you trust CBS? Do you trust PowerLine.com (Hinderaker's blog)? Why
or why not?

-- bill

// posted by newshare @ 4:15 PM

----------------------------------------------------------

David Carr, New York Times media blogger and critic, spoke on "The Role of Media in Strengthening Democracy" on Feb. 15, 2006 at SUNY Brockport in downtown Rochester, N.Y. (http://www.brockport.edu). Rochester City Newspaper, the alternative weekly, interviewed him in advance of the talk.

----------------------------------------------------------

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.rochester-citynews.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A4189
http://carpetbagger.nytimes.com/

PUBLISHED: FEBRUARY 8, 2006
Future tense: New York Times columnist David Carr on changes in the media

BY KRESTIA DEGEORGE
Rochester City Newspaper

It's not news that the media landscape is changing rapidly. Major consolidations of newspaper and broadcast ownership, the reliance on the internet for news: what will we end up with? And what impact will the changes have on democracy?

Among the writers exploring those questions is New York Times media critic David Carr. A veteran of the alternative press (he edited alt-weeklies in Minneapolis and Washington, DC), Carr writes the Times' first-ever blog, Carpetbagger, in addition to his job as the paper's media scribe. Carr --- who'd written media columns for Washington's City Paper and Twin Cities Reader --- says he almost passed on the chance to be a media columnist with the Times.

"Although I was reluctant at first, because I thought I was pretty much done with media, I eventually came around," he says. "And I'm glad I did, because the sky actually is falling right now, and it's fun and interesting and scary all at the same time to watch the ways in which media are atomizing and becoming commoditized."

Media consolidation has even reached the world of alternative journalism. Late last year, the two biggest alt-weekly chains, the Phoenix-based New Times and Village Voice Media, announced they were merging to form a mammoth (by alt-press standards, at least) new chain of weeklies.

Issues like these were to be on the bill of fare February 15, when Carr spoke at SUNY Brockport's downtown MetroCenter, and he discussed some of them in a recent interview. Here's what he had to say:

On the role of media in a democracy:

Part of the miracle of American democracy has always been based on the robust press, and I think that the press --- regardless of what platform you're speaking of --- has been able to bring accountability at certain points in the nation's history that were absolutely critical. Whether it's the Teapot Dome scandal or Watergate or the nexus of money and politics, I think that you can't really have a great democracy without having a great or at least good press.

On how technology will affect newsgathering and news consumption:

I think people assume that, "Oh, we'll be able to use the web to assemble a portrait of the world beyond our town," and the fact is that Google News or whatever RSS feeder you've got, most of it is just annotating coverage. Somebody has to make phone calls somewhere in order for news to function.

Where are the data inputs coming from? Where is the information coming from? In other words, who is making the phone calls? Who is sending the emails? You cannot have a robust discourse without a database of current information. And if the information that's being culled through is just government-issued data without a critical eye or editing, then you're going to end up with a fairly dumb republic.

There's a conceit that young people get their news from the Jon Stewart show or get their news from the web, but there was a study not long ago at Ball State, and if you're talking, say, 18 to 24, young people just don't get their news. That's all there is to it. They don't have a strong interest in it. So there you have a very attractive advertising demographic where there's no upside in serving them with that kind of information, because they have no interest or need. There's not much news on a Playstation, man.

On Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (whose free classifieds seem to have everyone in media complaining):

He's a smart guy and a person who is true to his values, and he believes that what he's doing is good for both media and democracy.

I talked to him a couple of weeks ago, and he struck me as a very
sincereperson. Classifieds are bedrock revenues that don't change much. For dweeklies and dailies, they've always sort of been there. And he's really going at a core franchise. I think he represents a significant threat to papers like yours. I was out with Michael Lacey last night, the New Times guy who just bought the Village Voice, and they certainly are paying attention to what he's doing.

On the Village Voice-New Times merger:

Well, I'm a fan of the New Times version of newspapering. They do very robust, city-oriented coverage that I think is a force for good, or at least accountability in the cities that they do them in. So I'm not up in arms about the fact that they bought that paper, I don't think the Village Voice is anywhere near the paper it once was.

The Village Voice is fairly tendentious in its coverage and is very interested in "progressive" sorts of things. And you know what? I newspapered in WashingtonDC at the Washington City Paper, which was nothing but Democrats and allegedly progressive Democrats, and the city was a complete basket case. So how you gonna root for that? It tends to rub out ideological approaches to coverage.

Newspapers should be in favor of competence. That's what they should root for. And I think that to the degree that newspapers or the media in general are perceived as being down on this administration, a lot of it is less about policy and more about execution. I mean, these guys seem to like war pretty well, and they're not very good at it. If you're going to be aggressive, there's a lot of execution risks that goes with that, and it behooves them to go and plan well and give our folks the equipment they need to do the job they've been asked to do. I think that's where a lot the sort of negative coverage has popped up.

On the future of alternative journalism:

I think that there's sort of a multi-part thread, in that you've chosen to work in printed media, but a lot of the more talented young people involved in media and in journalism are heading toward the web. You need to keep refreshing that sort of children's crusade of talented young reporters to make alternative newspapers vital.

Some weeklies have done a really good job with their websites: the Weekly Dig in Boston... MinneapolisCity Pages has had a robust, very interactive web site for a while. Some people are doing a better job of putting their brand into digital realms than others. Just look at some of the fundamental assets of alternative journalism: it's lippy discourse plus culturally literate recommendations plus listings. That list of assets has become somewhat unbundled and is available on the web, and it's far more searchable in that form.

If you want to read some smarty-pants writing, you don't have to go down to the coffee shop and get the weekly. Just open up Google and type in smarty pants, and it'll pop up everywhere. Now that consumers can time and platform shift, I think media companies have to be very, very nimble in terms of making their product available in the way that people want it.

And there are many large stories that are being covered in significant ways: the fact that significant parts of our manufacturing infrastructure are moving offshore, and now some of our intellectual infrastructure, software infrastructure is moving offshore. I do think that people are going to realize, Well, we have to be in the business of something; we can't just give the world Jennifer Lopez and King Kong and expect that to fuel an economy of our size.

One of my 17-year-old daughters asked me not long ago: "Do you think that China's going to end up running the world while I'm alive?" And I said, "Yeah, I think there's a pretty good chance of it." And I'm pretty sure she didn't get that off of MySpace. So as the stakes of the story increase, I think that people might reindex into news. When people are working off their part of affinity groups in MySpace, or they're working off RSS where they're getting information pushed to their desktop, they tend to sort of self-select into non-news categories. And you have to find a way to break through that.

--- END INTERVIEW ----

David Carr writes a column for the The New York Times' Monday Business section that focuses on media issues, including print, digital, film, radio and television. He also works as a general assignment reporter, covering all aspects of popular culture, for the Culture section of The New York Times. For the past 25 years, Mr. Carr has been writing about media as it intersects with business, culture and government.

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// posted by newshare @ 9:25 AM

Class:

The post below is something I grabbed off a blog last night by a commentator who I don't know. He misreads a posting on my website and puts words into my mouth which are actually those of U.S. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. But he also provides some useful links on media ownership, which is a topic we'll discuss sometime in March, I think.

-- bill

HERE IS THE BLOG ADDRRESS:
http://ytownherb02.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_ytownherb02_archive.html
http://ytownherb02.blogspot.com/2006/01/media-conglomeration-does-it-serve_27.html

MEDIA CONGLOMERATION: Does It Serve The Public's Best Interest?

Media conglomeration happens when large media corporations buy up smaller
media companies and convert them into subsidiaries. These small media
companies are usually struggling financially and are not economically
solvent. Without financial assistance, many of these small media companies
could not continue to operate and would eventually cease to exist. These
small financially troubled media companies are blindly lured under the
seemly protective umbrella of the large media corporations. The federal
government sees no violation in anti-trust laws, but congress is
investigating. A blog posted by Bill Densmore quotes U.S. Rep. Bernie
Sanders, I-Vt.: "One of our best-kept secrets is the degree to which a
handful of huge corporations control the flow of information in the United
States" --

ANTITRUST: Sanders -- Media conglomeration can't be ignored by Congress
http://mediagiraffe.blogspot.com/2005/10/antitrust-sanders-media-conglomeration.html

Sanders further explains how congress is reacting to Anti-trust
allegations. Even though parent corporations infuse cash into their small
new subsidiaries; utilize other subsidiaries for packaging and marketing;
and open up global markets, conglomeration affects the diversity of media
messages. The quality of the media content will decline and the uniqueness
of the media message is lost. There is a sameness that becomes universal
throughout the conglomeration. There is also corporate instability where
corporations, in order to raise cash, sell off subsidiaries that are
unprofitable. So does Media Conglomeration really serve the public's best
interests?

=======================================

OTHER LINKS: Media Conglomeration Gone Wrong
http://ualbany.blogspot.com/2005/12/media-conglomeration-gone-wrong.html

Media Conglomeration is so Passe.
http://newswithafeeling.blogspot.com/2005/06/media-conglomeration-is-so-passe.html

My Beef With Big Media -- by Ted Turner
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0407.turner.html

Corporate Media & Consolidation
http://www.thenation.com/directory/corporate_media_consolidation

A New Direction for Media Reform
http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/mediaownership/index.php

========================================
posted by Herb Green at 10:02 PM 0 comments links to this post

// posted by newshare @ 8:44 PM

Good example of the blogosphere echo chamber:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/02/hearts_and_mind.html

http://henwood.blogspace.com/?p=1597

// posted by newshare @ 10:50 AM

UPDATING:

Since there was no class last week (letting Lena off the hook), let's revise
the schedule of notetakers for the rest of the semester as follows:

Feb. 2 -- ChrisG
Feb. 8/9 -- CLASS POSTPONED: Okrent speech Feb. 13 -- Lena
Feb. 23 -- SethK
March 2 -- SteveB
March 9 -- JenT
March 16 -- SPRING BREAK
March 23 -- TristanB
March 30 -- DanD
April 6 -- ChrisG
April 13 -- LenaC
April 20 -- SethK
April 27 -- LenaC
May 4 -- JenT (last class)

BACKUP -- TristanB
BACKUP -- DanD

// posted by newshare @ 10:35 AM

On Thursday and Friday, Amy Goodman of the "Democracy Now" weekday newsmagazine, interviewed Mary Mapes, the CBS 60 Minutes producer fired in the "Rathergate" Bush National Guard story aftermath.

The first part is at:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/09/163259

And the second part at:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/10/1434202

This is the "other side" to the portion of the John Hinderacker tape we haven't seen yet. I'll cue up just that part of the Hinderaker interview and show it Thursday night.

-- bill

// posted by newshare @ 12:33 AM

Rich Skrenta, the founder of Topix.NET, is tracking experiments in citizen
journalism, including his own company's. Topix aggregates third-party news
from newspaper and blog sites around the United States so that you can
type in a zipcode and get all the news that's online for a particular
place (http://www.topix.net). Knight-Ridder, Tribune Co. and Gannett Co.
Inc. own 49% of Topix. Here is his post:

http://blog.topix.net/archives/000090.html

What he says in a nutshell: Stop trying to rate citizen journalism sites
based on journalism principles -- it's something different -- more citizen
than journalist.

// posted by newshare @ 8:03 PM

At Poynter, Romanesko writes about:

Former Business 2.0 and Wall Street Journal staffer G. Pascal Zachary (now a journalism professor at Stanford University) says veteran journalists know that the objectivity ethos is the "big lie" of their profession. "Actually, journalists are beholden to various points of view, and their commitment to balance is a convenient way of not talking about the rat's nest of commitments, concerns, biases and passions that animate the life of every good journalist and most of the bad ones." He proposes a new creed for journalism "that carries forward what's consistent with the uncertain waves of the Internet while affirming what journalism has always stood for."

(Zachary piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/wiretap/31775/), and also at: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/essays/zachary1.htm

More comment on this from from:
http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/02/10/the-trouble-with-objectivity/
February 10, 2006

This is an excerpt of a post by Dan Gillmor at his blog. Gillmor in turn is commenting on a post by Gregg Zachary entitled, "A Journalism Manifesto" (link below). Writes Gillmor:

"Professional journalists can restore their status only by taking radical action. They are getting torn to pieces fighting the wrong battles. Journalists keep telling critics that they are committed to hearing all sides. That they are committed to "objectivity," which in practical terms means giving ink and airtime to various viewpoints in a fair and even detached way. This so-called balance is supposed to translate into the all-important objectivity. I tend to agree with this, as I noted in a posting last year called "The End of Objectivity". but Zachary's call to arms is even more pointed than mine."

Zachary:
http://www.alternet.org/wiretap/31775/
Gillmor:
http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/2005/01/the_end_of_obje.html
Ververs:
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2006/02/10/publiceye/entry1305659.shtml

// posted by newshare @ 7:49 PM

Read the story below. It appears Saturday on the TruthOut.ORG website.

(Giraffe profile, incomplete:
http://www.mediagiraffe.org/profiles/index.php?action=profile&id=4)

Notice that the writer is a former Dow Jones Newswires reporter (part of Dow Jones & Co., owner of the Wall Street Journal, who is now freelancing -- and he has put his piece on TruthOut.org -- a blog-only site with no print component. Will it get picked up by the mainstream media?

Jason Leopold is the former Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires where he spent two years covering the energy crisis and the Enron bankruptcy. He just finished writing a book about the crisis, which was due out in December, 2005, through Rowman & Littlefield.
(above from: http://www.alternet.org/authors/6730/)

RELATED ORIGINAL STORY IN NATIONAL JOURNAL:
http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0209nj1.htm

NEW YORK TIMES COVER OF NATIONAL JOURNAL STORY:
http://www.kingcountyjournal.com/sited/story/html/229874

STORY POSTED THURS., FEB. 9, BELOW FROM:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020906J.shtml
ALSO AT: http://www.alternet.org/story/32073/

CIA Leak Scandal Goes to the Top

Bush administration officials reveal that the Vice President spearheaded the White House's efforts to discredit Joseph Wilson. Tools

By Jason Leopold, TruthOut.org. Posted February 9, 2006.

(Jason Leopold, a regular contributor to TruthOut, spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires.)

Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly criticizing the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, according to current and former administration officials. The officials work or had worked in the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council in a senior capacity and had direct knowledge of the Vice President's campaign to discredit Wilson.

In interviews over the course of two days this week, these officials were urged to speak on the record for this story. But they resisted, saying they had already testified before a grand jury investigating the leak of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and added that speaking out against the administration and specifically Vice President Cheney would cause them to lose their jobs and subject their families to vitriolic attacks by the White House. The officials said they decided to speak out now because they have become disillusioned with the Bush administration's policies regarding Iraq and the flawed intelligence that led to the war.

They said their roles, along with several others at the CIA and State Department, included digging up or "inventing" embarrassing information on the former Ambassador that could be used against him, preparing memos and classified material on Wilson for Cheney and the National Security Council, and attending meetings in Cheney's office to discuss with Cheney, Hadley, and others the efforts that would be taken to discredit Wilson.

A former CIA official who has worked in the counter-proliferation division, and is familiar with the undercover work Wilson's wife did for the agency, said Cheney and Hadley visited CIA headquarters a day or two after Joseph Wilson was interviewed on CNN.

These were the first public comments Wilson had made about Iraq. He said the administration was more interested in redrawing the map of the Middle East to pursue its own foreign policy objectives than in dealing with the so-called terrorist threat. "The underlying objective, as I see it, the more I look at this, is less and less disarmament, and it really has little to do with terrorism, because everybody knows that a war to invade and conquer and occupy Iraq is going to spawn a new generation of terrorists," Wilson said in a March 2, 2003, interview with CNN.

"So you look at what's underpinning this, and you go back and you take a look at who's been influencing the process. And it's been those who really believe that our objective must be far grander, and that is to redraw the political map of the Middle East," Wilson added. This was the first time that Wilson had spoken out publicly against the administration's policies. It was two and a half weeks before the start of the Iraq war.

But it wasn't Wilson who Cheney was so upset about when he visited the CIA in March 2003. During the same CNN segment in which Wilson was interviewed, former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright made similar comments about the rationale for the Iraq war and added that he believed UN weapons inspectors should be given more time to search the country for weapons of mass destruction.

The National Security Council and CIA officials said Cheney had visited CIA headquarters and asked several CIA officials to dig up dirt on Albright, and to put together a dossier that would discredit his work that could be distributed to the media. "Vice President Cheney was more concerned with Mr. Albright," the CIA official said. "The international community had been saying that inspectors should have more time, that the US should not set a deadline. The Vice President felt Mr. Albright's remarks would fuel the debate."

The officials said a "binder" was sent to the Vice President's office that contained material that could be used by the White House to discredit Albright if he continued to comment on the administration's war plans. However, it's unclear whether Cheney or other White House officials used the information against Albright.

A week later, Wilson was interviewed on CNN again. This was the first time Wilson ridiculed the Bush administration's intelligence that claimed Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger.

"Well, this particular case is outrageous. We know a lot about the uranium business in Niger, and for something like this to go unchallenged by US -- the US government -- is just simply stupid. It would have taken a couple of phone calls. We have had an embassy there since the early '60s. All this stuff is open. It's a restricted market of buyers and sellers," Wilson said in the March 8, 2003, CNN interview. "For this to have gotten to the IAEA is on the face of it dumb, but more to the point, it taints the whole rest of the case that the government is trying to build against Iraq." What Wilson wasn't at liberty to disclose during that interview, because the information was still classified, was that he had personally traveled to Niger a year earlier on behalf of the CIA to investigate whether Iraq had in fact tried to purchase uranium from the African country. Cheney had asked the CIA in 2002 to look into the allegation, which turned out to be based on forged documents!
, but was included in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address nonetheless.

Wilson's comments enraged Cheney, all of the officials said, because they were seen as a personal attack against the Vice President, who was instrumental in getting the intelligence community to cite the Niger claims in government reports to build a case for war against Iraq. The former Ambassador's stinging rebuke also caught the attention of Stephen Hadley, who played an even bigger role in the Niger controversy, having been responsible for allowing President Bush to cite the allegations in his State of the Union address.

At this time, the international community, various media outlets, and the International Atomic Energy Association had called into question the veracity of the Niger documents. Mohammed ElBaradei, head of IAEA, told the UN Security Council on March 7, 2003, that the Niger documents were forgeries and could not be used to prove Iraq was a nuclear threat.

Wilson's comments in addition to ElBaradei's UN report were seen as a threat to the administration's attack plans against Iraq, the officials said, which would take place 11 days later. Hadley had avoided making public comments about the veracity of the Niger documents, going as far as ignoring a written request by IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei to share the intelligence with his agency so his inspectors could verify the claims. Hadley is said to have known the Niger documents were crude forgeries, but pushed the administration to cite it as evidence that Iraq was a nuclear threat, according to the State Department officials, who said they personally told Hadley in a written report that the documents were bogus.

The CIA and State Department officials said that a day after Wilson's March 8, 2003, CNN appearance, they attended a meeting at the Vice President's office chaired by Cheney, and it was there that a decision was made to discredit Wilson. Those who attended the meeting included I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff who was indicted in October for lying to investigators, perjury and obstruction of justice related to his role in the Plame Wilson leak, Hadley, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and John Hannah, Cheney's deputy national security adviser, the officials said.

"The way I remember it," the CIA official said about that first meeting he attended in Cheney's office, "is that the vice president was obsessed with Wilson. He called him an 'asshole,' a son-of-a-bitch. He took his comments very personally. He wanted us to do everything in our power to destroy his reputation and he wanted to be kept up to date about the progress."

A spokeswoman for Cheney would not comment for this story, saying the investigation into the leak is ongoing. The spokeswoman refused to give her name. Additional calls made to Cheney's office were not returned. The CIA, State Department and National Security Council officials said that early on they had passed on information about Wilson to Cheney and Libby that purportedly showed Wilson as being a "womanizer" and that he had dabbled in drugs during his youth, allegations that are apparently false, they said. The officials said that during the meeting, Hadley said he would respond to Wilson's comments by writing an editorial about the Iraqi threat, which it was hoped would be a first step in overshadowing Wilson's CNN appearance.

A column written by Hadley that appeared in the Chicago Tribune on February 16, 2003, was redistributed to newspaper editors by the State Department on March 10, 2003, two days after Wilson was interviewed on CNN. The column, "Two Potent Iraqi Weapons: Denial and Deception" once again raised the issue that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.

Cheney appeared on Meet the Press on March 16, 2003, to respond to ElBaradei's assertion that the Niger documents were forgeries. "I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney said during the interview. "[The IAEA] has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past."

Cheney knew the State Department had prepared a report saying the Niger claims were false, but he thought the report had no merit, the two State Department officials said. Meanwhile, the CIA was preparing information for the vice president and his senior aides on Wilson should the former ambassador decide to speak out against the administration again.

Behind the scenes, Wilson had been speaking to various members of Congress about the administration's use of the Niger documents and had said the intelligence the White House relied upon was flawed, said one of the State Department officials who had a conversation with Wilson. Wilson's criticism of the administration's intelligence eventually leaked out to reporters, but with the Iraq war just a week away, the story was never covered.

It's unclear whether anyone disseminated information on Wilson in March 2003, following the meeting in Cheney's office. Although the officials said they helped prepare negative information on Wilson about his personal and professional life and had given it to Libby and Cheney, Wilson seemed to drop off the radar once the Iraq war started on March 19, 2003.

With no sign of weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq, news accounts started to call into question the credibility of the administration's pre-war intelligence. In May 2003, Wilson re-emerged at a political conference in Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. There he told the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff that he had been the special envoy who traveled to Niger in February 2002 to check out allegations that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the country. He told Kristoff he briefed a CIA analyst that the claims were untrue. Wilson said he believed the administration had ignored his report and were dishonest with Congress and the American people.

When Kristoff's column was published in the Times, the CIA official said, "a request came in from Cheney that was passed to me that said 'the vice president wants to know whether Joe Wilson went to Niger.' I'm paraphrasing. But that's more or less what I was asked to find out." In his column, Kristoff Had accused Cheney of allowing the truth about the Niger documents the administration used to build a case for war to go "missing in action." The failure of US armed forces to find any WMDs in Iraq in two months following the start of the war had been blamed on Cheney.

What in the previous months had been a request to gather information that could be used to discredit Wilson now turned into a full-scale effort involving the Office of the Vice President, the National Security Council, and the State Department to find out how Wilson came to be chosen to investigate the Niger uranium allegations. "Cheney and Libby made it clear that Wilson had to be shut down," the CIA official said. "This wasn't just about protecting the credibility of the White House. For the vice president, going after Wilson was purely personal, in my opinion."

Cheney was personally involved in this aspect of the information gathering process as well, visiting CIA headquarters to inquire about Wilson, the CIA official said. Hadley had also raised questions about Wilson during this month with the State Department officials and asked that information regarding Wilson's trip to Niger be sent to his attention at the National Security Council.

That's when Valerie Plame Wilson's name popped up showing that she was a covert CIA operative. The former CIA official who works in the counter-proliferation division said another meeting about Wilson took place in Cheney's office, attended by the same individuals who were there in March. But Cheney didn't take part in it, the officials said. "Libby led the meeting," one of the State Department officials said. "But he was just as upset about Wilson as Cheney was." The officials said that as of late May 2003 the only correspondence they had had was with Libby and Hadley. They said they were unaware who had made the decision to unmask Plame Wilson's undercover CIA status to a handful of reporters.

George Tenet, the former director of the CIA, took responsibility for allowing what is widely referred to as the infamous "sixteen words" to be included in Bush's State of the Union address. Tenet's mea culpa came one day after Wilson penned an op-ed for the New York Times in which he accused the administration of "twisting" intelligence on Iraq. In the column, Wilson revealed that he was the special envoy who traveled to Niger to investigate the uranium claims. Tenet is working on a book titled At the Center of the Storm with former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, which it is expected will be published later this year. Tenet will reportedly come clean on how the "sixteen words made it into the President's State of the Union speech, according to publishersmarketplace.com, an industry newsletter.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been investigating the Plame Wilson leak for more than two years, questioned Cheney about his role in the leak in 2004. Cheney did not testify under oath, and it's unknown what he told the special prosecutor. On September 14, 2003, during an interview with Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press," Cheney maintained that he didn't know Wilson or have any knowledge about his Niger trip or who was responsible for leaking his wife's name to the media. "I don't know Joe Wilson," Cheney said, in response to Russert, who quoted Wilson as saying there was no truth to the Niger uranium claims. "I've never met Joe Wilson. And Joe Wilson -- I don't who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back I don't know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn't judge him. I have no idea who hired him."

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// posted by newshare @ 9:12 AM