future-of-journalism

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2006/05/29/why_google_makes_everyone_else_nervous/

Why Google makes everyone else nervous
Firm's ad-based software is changing the media landscape

By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff | May 29, 2006

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Google Inc. first gained notice early in the decade, as a small and quirky start-up with a disarmingly simple Internet search engine and an idealistic slogan, ``Don't Be Evil."

Today the maverick company, adored by online shoppers and Internet surfers, has emerged as one of the most disruptive forces in the business world. Its secret sauce: a technology that lets business customers link targeted ads to search results and Web content.

By rolling out a spate of free search products, from Google Maps to Google News to Google Calendar, the company is doing more than building its consumer base. It's also building an alternative environment for software, advertising, and Internet content that is challenging the business models and eroding the revenue of everyone from publishers to software makers to Internet service providers.

``Google is causing disruption in a variety of areas," said Anthea Stratigos , co founder and chief executive of Outsell Inc., a Burlingame, Calif., research firm. ``It's pushing advertising revenue online. It's creating a model where software can be hosted by ad funding. Because of Google, things that have long been fee-based now have the potential to be free to consumers and supported by ads." The effect can be seen in falling profits, staff cutbacks, and programming changes in the media industry, but the changes brought about by the Google model may be only beginning. ``As they go forward, you're going to see the corporate jets disappear for the executives of NBC and the Internet service providers," predicted John Katsaros , principal at the Internet Research Group in Los Altos, Calif. ``You're going to see slow, agonizing deaths or reevaluation of businesses."

At a Google press day held earlier this month at the company's Googleplex campus here, the presentations focused almost entirely on new search products and services the company is offering at no charge to consumers: Google Co-Op for specialists, Google Trends for researchers, Google Notebook for people who like to scribble notes. Google executives avoided talking about their competitors, other than to profess that there is room for more than one company in the expanding Internet market. ``I do believe the winner, or winners if there's more than one, will be those companies that innovate most rapidly," said Eric Schmidt , the company's chief executive.

So far, Google, whose rapid-fire product releases have dazzled and dizzied computer users, has been the clearest winner. At the same time, many of its rivals -- from _Microsoft Corp._ to traditional print media companies -- have seen their growth rates flattening. Shares of Google, while down from their peak, have more than quadrupled in the less than two years since its initial public offering, which was a celebrated event from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. With its profits enjoying double-digit growth, up 26 percent in the first quarter, Google has grown into a financial juggernaut. Last year, its operating income climbed 33 percent to $2 billion, its revenue 92 percent to $6.1 billion, and its employee rolls 88 percent to 5,680.

The once cuddly image of its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page , the Stanford University grad students who developed their search technology in dorm rooms and incorporated Google in 1998, has been largely erased by their newfound success and assertiveness. That assertiveness was notable at the press gathering at Google earlier this month, when Brin addressed his company's concern that Microsoft would use its operating system to unfair advantage by steering customers to Microsoft's search engine. Brin said that Google recognized it was dealing with ``a convicted monopolist" with a history of ``behaving anti competitively." In lobbying to prevent Internet service providers from charging content companies for access and refusing to apologize for bowing to Chinese government restrictions on Internet content, Google has been demonstrating a greater willingness to throw around its weight in the political arena and put its commercial interests front and center.

Research firms are only now beginning to take the measure of the company's influence. A recent study by Outsell showed that 80 percent of advertisers now use the Internet, with the adoption rate projected to hit 90 percent by 2008. While search engine advertising is expected to increase 26 percent this year, with Google raking in the largest share, spending is projected to grow 2 percent for newspaper and magazine ads and 2.4 percent for radio and television ads.

Similarly, the Google effect has reduced Internet service companies -- who'd once hoped to be gateways to the Internet that profited from Internet services -- to ``pipe companies" that build networks and charge businesses and consumers for access. And, Google's e-mail, calendar, and word-processing products are pioneering an ad-supported Internet delivery model that threatens the desktop licensing model of Microsoft and other proprietary software companies, and could appeal to their ``enterprise" market of businesses and other organizations. Aiding Google's efforts to deliver robust software on the Internet, and faster search results, is a worldwide network of between 300,000 and 1 million servers, according to analysts' estimates; Google itself declines to specify its number of servers.

Microsoft and _Yahoo Inc._ counter Google, with Yahoo concentrating more on original content and Microsoft developing its own search capabilities and ad-supported Internet software. But the biggest threat to Google could be the proliferation of local and smaller vertical search engines -- in fields like travel, finance, and retail -- that could offer even more targeted advertising. Many newspapers, among others, are developing local search technology.

``If you want to attack Google, you're more likely to succeed by peeling off searches that are vertically oriented," said Fredrick Marckini , chief executive of search engine marketing firm iProspect of Watertown, a division of London-based Aegis Isobar Worldwide.

Marckini said Google is fighting back by deputizing ``contributors," specialists who can provide niche-oriented searches, and by offering advertisers more information on what people search for. Google's newest product offerings could be especially attractive to advertisers, said Sapna Satagopan , search analyst for JupiterKagan Inc., a San Francisco research firm. ``Every one of these new releases seems to be going in that direction of creating small groups of consumers so they can offer them to advertisers," Satagopan said.

Robert Weisman can be reached at _weisman@globe.com_
(mailto:weisman@globe.com) .

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ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051806O.shtml
POSTED: May 18, 2006
A t r u t h o u t | Perspective

HEADLINE: Corporate Media and Advocacy Journalism

By Norman Solomon

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EDITOR'S NOTE -- Norman Solomon is the author of the new book War Made
Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. For
information, go to: WarMadeEasy.com.
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We see this kind of news story now and again. Sometimes we try to imagine the people behind the numbers, the human realities underneath the surface abstractions. But overall, the responses testify to journalism's failings - and our own.

"Poor nutrition contributes to the deaths of some 5.6 million children every year," an Associated Press dispatch said early this month, citing new data from the UN Children's Fund. And: "In its report, UNICEF said one of every four children under age 5, including 146 million children in the developing world, is underweight." The future is bleak for many children who will be born in the next decade. As AP noted, "the world has fallen far short in efforts to reduce hunger by half before 2015."

Reading this news over a more-than-ample breakfast, I thought about the limitations of journalistic work that is often done with the best of intentions.Try as they might, reporters and editors don't often go beyond the professional groove of the media workplace. Journalists routinely function as cogs in media machinery that processes tragedy as just another news commodity. Many people are troubled by the patterns of negative events around the world. And hunger is especially disturbing; in an era of prodigious affluence for some, the absence of basic nutrition for huge numbers of human beings is a basic moral obscenity. Across the spectrums of culture, faith and ideologies - whether remedies might seem to lie in religious charity or governmental action - heartfelt desire to reduce suffering is very common.

News outlets are adept at producing vivid stories about misfortune. Those stories might be emotionally affecting or even politically mobilizing in terms of relief efforts. But the overarching matter of priorities is not apt to come into media focus. In general, corporate-employed journalists are not much more inclined to hammer at the skewed character of national and global priorities than corporate chieftains or government officials are.

In a world where so much wealth and so much poverty coexist, the maintenance of a rough status quo depends on a sense of propriety that borders on - and even intersects with - moral if not legal criminality. The institutional realities of power may numb us to our own personal sense of the distinction between what is just and what is just not acceptable.

On this planet in 2006, no greater contrast exists than the gap between human hunger and military spending. While international relief agencies slash already-meager food budgets because of funding shortfalls, the largesse for weaponry and war continues to be grotesquely generous. The globe's biggest offender is the United States government, which at the current skyrocketing rate of expenditures is - if you add up all the standard budgets and "supplemental" appropriations for war - closing in on a time when US military spending willreach $2 billion per day.

This is what Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about in 1967 when he warned: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Such an occurrence isn't sudden; it overtakes us gradually, becoming part of thenormalized scenery.

Journalism, in its prevalent incarnations, has a strong tendency to blend into that scenery. And whether you're working in a newsroom or watching in a living room or reading at a breakfast table, it takes a conscious act of will to look at the big picture - and challenge the reigning priorities that are simultaneously quite proper and horrific.

We're encouraged to see high-quality journalism as dispassionate, so that professionals do their jobs without advocating. But passive acceptance of murderous priorities in our midst is a form of de facto advocacy. It's advocacy of the most convincing sort - by example.A hoary cliché says money makes the world go 'round. The extent to which that's true may be arguable. But deeper questions revolve around the priorities that ought to determine the profoundly important choices made by individuals and institutions. Journalism can't answer those questions. But journalism should ask them.

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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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/business/media/15students.html

Times Are Tough for News Media, but Journalism Schools Are Still Booming
Published: May 15, 2006

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
The New York Times

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- These are tough times for journalism.

The newspaper industry cut more than 2,000 jobs last year as it continued to lose readers and advertisers to the Internet. Network newscasts are being propped up by older viewers and continue to lose market share to cable. Regular reports of ethical breaches are undermining public trust in all news organizations, bloggers accuse the mainstream media of being arrogant and clueless, and Wall Street expresses little confidence in its financial future. But there is one corner of the profession still enjoying a boom: journalism schools.

Demand for seats in the nation's journalism schools and programs remains robust, and those schools and programs are expanding. This month, they will churn out more graduates than ever into a job market that is perhaps more welcoming toentry-level multimedia-taskers than it is to veterans who began their careers hunting and pecking on Olivetti typewriters. "If you've got the skills, the jobs are there," Diego Sorbara, who is graduating shortly from the Missouri School of Journalism here, said with the confidence of a 22-year-old who has lined up two jobs, first as a copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel this summer, then as a copy editor and page designer at The Rocky Mountain News.

"Newspaper people are too pessimistic," he said. "Part of the nature of journalism is to adapt to your surroundings. We can't all stay in our ruts. If you get into this whole spiral of, 'Woe is us, the industry is going down,' then it will go down." Michele Steele, 27, who is graduating from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York, has a similar outlook. She has been hired as a reporter and anchor for the video network at Forbes magazine's Web site, www.forbes.com. "Certainly the industry is changing," Ms. Steele said as she monitored the Forbes Web site in the school's new Roone Arledge Broadcast Lab, named after the former head of ABC News. "But the changes are positive."

Some of those changes are being reflected on the nation's campuses, where new media is being taught alongside the old. Missouri's journalism school the oldest in the country is building a new institute with a $31 million grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation for a "convergence center," where journalists and ordinary citizens can study emerging media technologies and new approaches to journalism and advertising.

In New York, Columbia just opened the multimillion-dollar Arledge digital television lab and last fall introduced a new one-year master of arts program in which student journalists can concentrate in a field like business or the arts. It plans to open a new center for investigative journalism this summer.

In addition to such established schools, other new options are arising. Steven Brill, the founder of The American Lawyer and Court TV, and his wife, Cynthia, gave $1 million earlier this year for a new journalism program at Yale. And the City University of New York is opening a whole new Graduate School of Journalism in September. It is even reclaiming an old-media landmark, the New York Herald Tribune building in Midtown Manhattan.

In 2004, the latest year for which there are comprehensive statistics, freshman enrollments in more than 450 journalism and mass communications programs across the country increased 5.2 percent over the previous year, marking the 11th consecutive year of growth. The figures are compiled by a team led by Lee B. Becker, a professor in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, who has surveyed journalism enrollments and the job market for two decades. "There is no evidence as of yet that any of these discussions of gloom and doom in the industries, and particularly the newspaper industry, are having any adverse affect on enrollments," Mr. Becker said, although his survey did show a slowing of the growth rate from 2003 to 2004.

"Students are interested in writing," he said. "They're interested in the broader sense of what the media are and what role they play in society, and those are the things that drive them, not hearing about Knight Ridder dealing with a stockholders' revolt." Students are also driven by the very changes that are upending the old media. For one thing, many do not read the print version of newspapers. As Dustin Hodges, 22, who is graduating from Missouri in August, put it, "I don't pick up a newspaper unless it's in front of me and it's free." For the latest news, he hops online, where he spends three or four hours a day anyway.

Today's students have grown up immersed in the Internet and with the ability to adapt rapidly to new technologies, giving them a comfort level with things that newspapers are just discovering, like blogs, podcasts and video clips. Richard J. Roth, senior associate dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University where the number of applicants has increased every year for the last six years likes to note that one of his school's graduates is Kevin Sites, who has become a pioneering one-man multimedia foreign correspondent for Yahoo. He said newspapers were replacing older journalists with those, like Mr. Sites, who were grounded in the basics of news but could also present it in an array of formats. "They're just buying out the people who are earning at the top and replacing them with people at the bottom," he said, "but those people at the bottom know how to put up podcasts and video."

Unlike some older journalists who may feel threatened by the digital world, today's students are so at home in it that some know more than their professors. "We're maybe one step ahead of them, and sometimes they're two or three steps ahead of us," said Mike McKean, chairman of Missouri's convergence journalism faculty. "Things are changing so quickly that it's not so much about learning a particular tool or software. It's more about an attitude of working in teams and producing content for different audiences."

Jake Jost interned with Lisa Myers at NBC News in Washington. At the same time, Brian S. Brooks, the associate dean of undergraduate studies, said Missouri was still emphasizing basic reporting and writing. "We're still making students drill down in the existing media," he said. "That's where the jobs are. You don't want to get too far out in front of the industry."

At Columbia in New York, one multimedia student, Julia Kumari Drapkin, said she was having just that experience. Ms. Drapkin, 27, a photographer who had taken pictures in Sri Lanka after the tsunami and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, went to Columbia to broaden her skills. She said that some news organizations were not yet ready to allow photographers to write, for example, or shoot video, but she did find a summer internship at Time magazine and its Web site, where she said she would be encouraged to help "rethink the photo essay." "In this changing media landscape, there's an opportunity for us to be able to do a new kind of reporting," she said. At Time, she said, "there will be conversations about how to handle the new media and I want to be part of that conversation."

Stephen B. Shepard, the founding dean of the City University's journalism school, said journalism education was more valuable to students these days than in years past, in part because news organizations were less able to provide on-the-job training. "There are more demands on people; staffs have been cut, everyone is watching the bottom line and you can't get the training and mentoring that you used to get," he said. But like many young people just starting their careers, many new journalism graduates seem unfazed by these challenges.

Jake Jost, 24, who interned with Lisa Myers, a senior investigative reporter for NBC News in Washington last year, said that news organizations would always need people with basic skills. "By doing solid news, we can make ourselves relevant to viewers and they'll come back," he said.

At Columbia, Emily Brady, 29, was waiting to talk to a recruiter from Newsday, the Long Island newspaper beset with woes ever since a circulation scandal in 2004. "You don't go into this profession to get rich," Ms. Brady said. "There are financial sacrifices, it's a tough profession, you're under fire, and it's not necessarily the most popular thing to say you're a journalist," she said. "But it's a calling."

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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.

ORIGINAL URL:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114727164857848939.html
PUBLISHED: May 15, 2006

THE JOURNAL REPORT: TECHNOLOGY
Me, Me, Me

The personalized newspaper was dreamed up two decades ago. We're getting
closer and closer.

By JESSICA MINTZ
May 15, 2006; Page R9

The Web has made accessing far-flung news outlets, from tiny local papers
to major foreign presses and every Web log and magazine in between, as
simple as a couple of mouse clicks. But keeping that deluge of information
organized hasn't been so easy for readers.

Now, some Web sites are taking a stab at a new solution:
more-sophisticated personalized news pages. These sites are the latest
step in the evolution of "The Daily Me" -- the name coined by the founders
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab two decades ago
for their idea of a perfectly personalized newspaper.

But those tools have a couple of major shortcomings. One is that they do
nothing to help readers deal with the sheer volume of material that's out
there: It's not uncommon for people to track dozens of blogs, news sites
and other Web sites with RSS feeds, and much of the material they collect
this way inevitably goes unread. Then there's the other side of the coin:
Readers may be missing out on lots of other news they'd be interested in
but that doesn't make it through their filters.

Now, a new generation of Web start-ups is trying to address those
drawbacks in different ways but with a common premise. These sites track
the reading habits of their users as a whole, then use that data to make
suggestions to individuals based on what others like them are reading.
This communal news judgment can help ensure that readers don't miss
important stories outside their usual interests. And it can even help
online news junkies decide which of the stories they choose to see are
must-reads, and which can more safely be skipped.

One of these new sites is Rojo.com3, owned by San Francisco-based Rojo
Networks Inc. Rojo.com helps users find and organize RSS feeds. Instead of
just having users plug in the feeds they know they want to read, Rojo asks
new users to define their general interests and favorite sources first.
During the sign-up process, users check boxes next to topics such as "News
-- top stories" and "Iraq/military bloggers." Then they can choose from a
list of big-name news sources. Rojo automatically subscribes new users to
popular feeds that match their interests. Readers who already had a list
of RSS feeds can have those displayed on the site as well.

Users can add a new feed to their Rojo account at any time or use the
search box on the site to find new ones; a search for "iPod," for example,
brought up 67 different feeds.

What really distinguishes Rojo from other RSS readers -- sites that
organize and display RSS feeds -- is the way it uses data it collects from
all of its users, currently about 100,000 unique visitors per month. The
site looks at each individual user's feeds and interests, and figures out
what's missing from his or her list that similar members are reading. In a
box at the top of each page, the site recommends one new feed every time
the user clicks onto a new page.

Rojo members can view their feeds by "relevance," in addition to date or
alphabetical order. The relevance ranking automatically combines the
user's personal interests and past reading patterns with how "hot" the
story is among other readers -- especially readers with similar profiles.
So even if a reader doesn't take advantage of the site's suggestions for
new feeds, it can help that reader prioritize the feeds he or she is
receiving.

Michael Davidson, co-founder and chief executive of Seattle-based Newsvine
Inc., says he follows more than 100 handpicked feeds, mostly about the
technology industry, in an RSS reader. Still, he feels like he could miss
out on important stories. "How am I supposed to find out about bombing in
Iraq, or hunger in Africa," he asks, when "I haven't specifically said
'Yes, subscribe me to those topics'?"

Newsvine.com10 tries to solve that problem by relying heavily on the
collective behavior of its users. The site, which launched to the general
public on March 1, is built around content from the Associated Press wire
service and Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN11. But the layout isn't static. The
actions of all Newsvine users push certain stories to the top of the
site's main page, and to the top of its sub-pages (U.S. and world news,
technology, sports, etc.). In addition to just reading a story, Newsvine
users can click on an arrow icon to vote on its importance. They can also
make comments and join live chats about each story. All of those factors
together affect how prominently a story is displayed on the site.

The typical Newsvine page leads with a top news story, displayed as a
headline, splashy photo, first paragraph and link to the complete story.
It is followed by a short list of the most voted-on and most commented-on
stories; the latest top articles from the AP wire (ranked by AP editors)
are shown as smaller links off to the side.

Parts of the page are set aside for "seeds," or stories from blogs or news
sites outside of Newsvine that users recommend. Those articles rise to the
top of the list the same way news stories do -- through votes and comments
of readers.

Users can also personalize their pages by setting up "watchlists." Every
news article, "seed" and member home page (which doubles as a blog) gets
tagged with keywords. Users can search for a keyword and, if it exists,
click on a green button to "watch" it -- the equivalent of subscribing to
an RSS feed of every story with that tag.

For example, a member could have searched for "Syracuse" and then added it
to a watchlist to follow the surprising victory of the university's men's
basketball team in the Big East conference tournament, and the team's
quick exit from the national tournament.

A third news site, Findory.com12, also relies heavily on the behavior of
its users, but doesn't require them to list their interests, select feeds
or vote on stories. Instead, it works on the same principle as
Amazon.com's recommendations, which is no coincidence: Findory.com Inc.
was founded in 2004 by Greg Linden, the engineer behind Amazon's
recommendations engine.

Findory, which has amassed a following of about 100,000 visitors a month,
looks at an individual's reading history, compares it with similar
readers' tastes, and offers up links to stories that similar readers have
enjoyed -- or at least read.

The first time a user visits Findory.com, the home page shows a mix of
news stories and blog entries, based on a combination of general
popularity and how recently the stories first appeared. Findory assumes
that when a user clicks on a story, he or she is interested in the
subject. Each time the user returns to the Findory home page after
clicking on an article, he or she will find the page reconfigured with a
different mix of stories, some marked with sunbursts to indicate a
recommended read.

--Ms. Mintz is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's New York
bureau.

Write to Jessica Mintz at jessica.mintz@wsj.com13

A sampling of other innovative news Web sites:

. Reddit.com
Links to articles on the Web, submitted and ranked by votes from the
site's users. Every time you vote for a story, the site gets to know what
you like and filters results to suit your tastes.

. Digg.com
Technology news links, submitted and ranked by reader votes.

. Memeorandum.com
Links to the political stories generating the most buzz on the Web; draws
together mainstream news articles, blogosphere discussion and related
links.

. Feedster.com
A directory of sites that send out updates to subscribers using a
technology known as an RSS feed. Type a keyword into Feedster's search box
and find feeds from blogs and news sites.

. PubSub.com
The site trawls millions of data sources for keywords that match your
interests. When a new match is added, it tells you.

. Backfence.com
An experiment in hyperlocal news written by residents of a community.
Topics range from weekend events and local business ratings to municipal
news stories. Available in just a few communities so far.

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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.

ORIGINAL URL:
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/13/business/13online.html
Published: May 13, 2006

COLUMN: What's Online
HEADLINE: No Neutral Ground in Net Debate

By DAN MITCHELL
The New York Times

ACCORDING to Arianna Huffington, the use of banal, insipid language could spell doom for the Internet.

It is not badly written blogs Ms. Huffington is worried about, but the concept "Net neutrality." Congress is debating whether to block Internet service providers from favoring some content providers over others. So, in theory, Time Warner or Verizon could prefer Yahoo over Google, or vice versa (or either of those over an upstart) by giving them more bandwidth in exchange for cash. The preferred sites would then run faster on PC's than those that do not pay.

Last week, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, introduced the Network Neutrality Act of 2006, a bill backed by Amazon, Microsoft and other Web companies, as well as disparate interests like the Gun Owners of America and the liberal group MoveOn.org. Proposed legislation that could change the nature of how the Internet operates should be getting a lot more attention, Ms. Huffington wrote. And if it did, it would be instantly squashed. Why hasn't this happened? It's all in the name, she wrote. "Now, I understand that 'Net Neutrality' is a technical term used to describe the separation of content and network operations, but what political genius decided to run with such a clunky name? The marketing mavens behind the Kerry '04 campaign?"

The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com) has become a clearinghouse for debate. Most contributors are in favor of Net neutrality. But the site has also included arguments from, for example, Mike McCurry, the former Clinton press secretary who is chairman of Hands Off the Internet, a group financed by AT&T, BellSouth and other concerns and interest groups. The group calls itself "a nationwide coalition of Internet users" who oppose government regulation.

On Huffington, Adam Green of MoveOn.org enumerated what he called lies from Mr. McCurry for example, that the Internet was currently "absent regulation" and that a neutrality law would alter the way the Internet operates. Mr. Green argued that the Net was already neutral, and it was the telecom companies that wanted that to change. Mr. McCurry decried the "culture and discourse of the Internet," referring to his detractors as "net neuts."

The telecom industry, he wrote, just wants the Net to be governed by economics, not government regulation. "Anyone want to have a rational conversation about that or do you want to rant and rave and provide a lot of May Day rhetoric that is not based in any fact?"

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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.

http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/Opinion/Columnists/Brown_Dan/2006/05/11/1574814.html

By DAN BROWN
ONLINE EDITOR
London [Ont.] Free Press (Canada)

As regular readers of this column know, theres nothing I like better than a
good book. I recently finished reading David Kline and Dan Bursteins
402-page-long tome, blog! which isnt all that good, but it did provoke some
thoughts.

As you may be able to surmise from the title of the collection of essays and
articles, blog! is an attempt to gauge the impact bloggers are having in the
realms of culture, politics and business. And, as might be expected, the
authors overstate the importance of their chosen subject. They do have a
vested interest in feeding the hype about weblogs, after all.

How potent are blogs, in the eyes of Kline and Burstein? So potent they have
the potential to change human nature. At one point, Kline concludes that
blogs are to be lauded because one must assume that the more deliberatively
people appraise and document their lives, the more purposefully those lives
will be lived.

Uh, no.

There are few inventions that have altered the character of humankind. It
just doesnt happen. Off the top of my head, I can think of maybe one that
has (the birth-control pill). Blogs are just one more method for
communicating. They arent the be-all and end-all.

The most illuminating comments in blog! come in interviews with industry
figures who dont buy into the master theory offered by Kline and Burstein.

Blogs are a tool, an instrument, nothing more, says Markos Moulitsas Zuniga,
the blogger behind the popular DailyKos site. Nick Denton he of the Gawker
family of sites echoes those comments, saying bluntly that blogs are not
going to supplant established media outlets such as The New York Times, just
supplement them.

Now, you may be thinking the reason Im bearish on blogs is my status as a
card-carrying member of the mainstream media. Not so. Im all for blogs. When
it comes to websites, Ive always said Let a thousand flowers bloom. Being a
libertarian, I firmly believe choice leads to competition and competition
raises everyones game.

But let me give you a different perspective. There is much discussion in
blog! about citizen journalism, the prevailing sentiment being that blogs
are going to allow the average person Joe or Jane Blogger, if you will to
take over the role currently played by newspaper and television
correspondents. I doubt this is going to happen, and my feelings have
nothing to do with professional insecurity and everything to do with the
practicalities of reporting.

Heres the thing: Journalism takes an investment of time and effort. Citizen
journalism is going to remain a limited enterprise because the average
person just doesnt the time or energy to spare.

Let me demonstrate my point with an analogy. The technology also exists for
the average person to make their own bread, but how many of us do so? Youd
have to buy a bread maker, round up the ingredients, then dedicate a part of
your day to baking. Most of us figure its easier and more convenient to let
the professionals handle all of that, so we make a mental trade-off and pick
up our bread needs at the grocery store.

This is the same logic that will keep journalists in business for a long
time to come. Just because the technology exists for the average person to
have a global audience, that doesnt automatically mean lots of people are
going to take advantage of that technology. Im not saying the average person
is lazy; Im saying the average person already has a packed schedule with a
day job and a family to tend to, so he or she will continue to let trained
professionals do the lions share of the information gathering and
distribution.

(Im not letting so-called dead-tree media off the hook. For my thoughts on
the future of newspapers read this column I wrote a few weeks back.)

Which isnt to say some bloggers wont become influential media stars. Thats
already happened. And thats not to say citizen journalism is doomed Ill
grant you that its here to stay (our partners at Canoe.ca recently launched
a new venture in citizen journalism, which you can check out here.) What Im
saying is that its not going to replace mainstream media. The two will
co-exist. Blogging will be a side dish to the main course of old media.

As enthusiastic as the authors of blog! are, even they admit that bloggers
rely for the most part on established media sources. Few bloggers, after
all, gather and report the news, writes Kline. Instead, they utilize the
news gathering resources of traditional media and then apply ideas,
opinions, ironies, links and other kinds of context to the work originally
done by the reporter.

It looks like youre stuck with us.
Email: dbrown@lfpress.com
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ORIGINAL URL:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114717839352947700-Nsu_HUWPFswsM7wBQ7vJSgDhonQ_20060516.html?mod=blogs
Posted May 10, 2006

ORIGINAL HEADLINE:
The Perfect News Site, 2016: Readers Want More Context, New Ways to View
And Filter News Plus, More Telegenic Reporters

By DAVE PETTIT
The Wall Street Journal

Readers want more context and background included in news reporting. They want new ways to receive their news, on next-generation handheld devices, for instance, rather than simply on a Web page. They want fewer ads -- especially the kind that animate or show up in popup windows. It turns out that they also want more-telegenic news reporters.

These are among the things readers expect from the news site of the future. In connection with WSJ.com's 10th anniversary, we asked readers to look ahead and describe for us the perfect news site, circa 2016. Some comments focused on WSJ.com; many were about news sites in general. Here is a sampling.

Filtered News

People are awash in news and information. What they really need is highly edited coverage that makes the best use of their time. "I would like to receive only news that is news to me, not news that I have already read or heard," wrote one. Said another: "Some days I think we were all blessed when we had [just] an evening newspaper and the 6:30 network news." One solution: a site that is adaptable "to filter, prioritize and effectively size the amount of news to my needs. I may want to know that a shooting has occurred in Lower Phoenix, but not want the 20 different eyewitness statements."

Not Just a Web Page

The perfect news Web site won't be just a Web site. "It will literally be in the palm of our hand," wrote one reader. Today, millions of people retrieve news over cellphones or Blackberry devices, but that's just the start. The next generation would have a hard drive, a bigger screen and a better "input device." Another reader foresees news sites morphed into directories of information: "Instead of clicking on pages, there will be a hierarchy of news by section (world, national, regional, business, sports, lifestyle)."

Still another idea would make news sites portable -- with content moved easily, by the user, onto other sites, such as those of brokerage firms. "Instead of having to duplicate my holdings all over the Web so I can get customized news from various sources, I would login to my secure [brokerage] account and there I would find, alongside my portfolio, links to WSJ news and articles." Another reader sees perfection in a "completely voice-activated" site.

Another Way to Pay the Bills

One of the most frequent requests was to rein in advertising. Sure, it pays the bills for Web publishers, but some readers won't hear of it. "Ads take up screen real estate and are distracting and annoying," wrote one. He suggested that sites offer subscriptions to special advertising-free versions of their overage -- or versions with just tiny ads at the bottom of each page. Another reader made the point that sites should choose one revenue stream and stick to it. His point: The perfect news site wouldn't sell ads, require subscription fees and charge for extra features, such as archived articles. In this regard, to him, WSJ.com is some distance from perfection.

Let the Readers Pitch In

Much has been made lately of citizen journalism and the perfect site of the future would build on that. "Editors will be a thing of the past. Instead, users will vote content to the front page. Fact checkers will be the only staff left as they verify and comment on the information posted be the community of readers. In the next decade the broadcaster and the reader will merge into one." Wrote another: "Instead of traditional news bureaus, a sophisticated network of freelancers, some with no journalistic experience, will act as correspondents, filing stories from computers inside their homes from around the world. The news will be more in depth, and news will be covered much faster."

Note to journalism students: Consider a double major.

Drilling Down

Readers want context and depth in news reporting on the Web. "When you report quarterly profits for a corporation (Exxon, for example) that are unusually large, allow me to see a 'popup' of the profits for the last eight quarters so I can understand what is large," wrote one. Another idea: "Your reporters ÿÿ find out all sorts of things when writing an article or cover a business, but these don't always fit into the form of a news article. They should be dumped into an encyclopedia."

Worth a Thousand Words

In 10 years, Web news will migrate away from text and toward audio and video. "I see a large selection of live streaming video, for example, being offered to you once you log in based on your interests. Codes embedded in the video will allow search engines to find video on warehouse fires, for example, and push them to you," wrote one reader. "The perfect Web site will be a mix of print news, video and audio news. News Web sites will also compete with 24-hour cable news and major networks by offering prime-time news programming on the Web," said another.

There's just one thing: If news sites are going to turn increasingly to video, they are going to have to pay attention to appearances. "By 2016 we will doubtless see more 'pretty faces' in the pressroom than we do today. I predict that Dow Jones & Co. will be adding cosmetic surgery to the roster of employee benefits."

Write to Dave Pettit at dave.pettit@wsj.com

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As a final paper, students in the "Future of Journalism" seminar at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, in North Adams, Mass., were invited by Visiting Lecturer Bill Densmore to write a business plan for a 21st century news organization. Densmore instructed them to discuss its purpose, audience, governance, ownership, products, revenue models and sources. In addition, the students were asked to discuss how "news" and "journalism" would be defined and practiced and the relationship between the journalist as arbitrator/expert vs. moderator/convener.

The reply comments to this post constitute excerpts of the students' work.

ORIGINAL URL:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4972302.stm
POSTED: May 4, 2006

HEADLINE: The changing mix of money and media

By Dan Gillmor
Columnist at the BBC Online website

Ad revenue made Bernstein and Woodward's Watergate expose possible. A few years ago, a newspaper writer looked at the burgeoning world of online news gathering and dissemination and said: "One of these days we're going to find out what people actually want to read."

Journalists, accustomed to telling their readers - or viewers or listeners - what they need to know, might have found the idea somewhat disturbing. Here was the possibility that the audience would, via mouse clicks, become the arbiters of what was newsworthy, and that journalistic competition might reflect a lower, perhaps the lowest, common denominator.If so, journalists who cared about depth and quality would face what we might call a tyranny of popularity.

Competition time

Apart from the elitism that suggests, the worry isn't entirely wrong. But while mass media tend to be pandering more and more to entertainment and diversion, not serious journalism, something else has occurred in the online world. The more serious cyber-journalistic competition appears to be for niche topics, where bloggers and other people using democratized publishing tools can win audiences by going narrow and deep, instead of the wide and shallow coverage that prevails in much of the mass media.

But the most serious competitive threat to traditional journalism doesn't come from bloggers and their compatriots. It comes instead from businesses that are also using technology's power. They're winning advertising, the other kind of "content" that appears in print publications and broadcasts. What if we're in for a decade or two of decline in the watchdog journalism that takes deep pockets and a civic commitment to produce?

Marketing isn't disappearing overall. It's just moving to different venues, and bodes badly for the way we've supported journalism over the past century or so.Newspapers, in particular, rely in significant part on classified advertising, a lucrative business with absurdly high profit margins.But in recent years web services such as eBay, Monster.com, craigslist and others have carved away a nontrivial portion of that business. They offer customers, both buyers and sellers, a much better deal: greater convenience, larger selection, unlimited "space" for the advertisement on the web page and lower prices, sometimes outright free.

The competitors for classified advertising are nimble, well-funded and innovative. The only one of those attributes newspapers can match, for the moment, is the ability to invest. To their great advantage, the online competitors can operate far more leanly and cheaply for their customers - in part because doing journalism would be an absurd distraction from their businesses, not a foundation of what they do.

Few broadcasters share the BBC's funding system

Meanwhile, Google and other online advertising brokerages are carving away some of the remaining revenue. This occurs even as they cosy up to traditional media organisations, which apparently see no alternative to doing business with companies that ultimately could be their undoing.

Ad break

Consider broadcasters' problems. Commercial programmes rely on the 30-second advertisement. In our home, we have a hard-disk video recording system. It comes with a remote-control device that makes 30 seconds disappear with a single press of a button. Goodbye to another business model, and I can't say I'm terribly bothered by contributing to what for the producers is a genuine problem. In an age of innovation, business models face disruption.

Few organisations have the current luxury of the BBC, which collects what almost amounts to a tax to fund its reports. (Pay me or go to jail: Now there's a business model.) Fewer still have the kind of franchise that looks unassailable. For most media companies, the days of waiting for the phone to ring, and then take advertisers' dollars as a matter of course, are in ever-greater jeopardy.

Sound journalism is a foundation of an informed citizenry in self-governing nations. These economic trends suggest serious problems for the organizations that have used the manufacturing model of media - with attendant barriers to entry that made it so profitable for more than a half-century - in part as a way of supporting high-quality journalism. Many classified adverts are moving to the net So I worry. What if we can't come up with useful journalism business models in the near term to replace the eroding ones? What if we're in for a decade or two of decline in the watchdog journalism that takes deep pockets and a civic commitment to produce? Even in a worst case, it won't all disappear. People will still write books, and some mass media are likely to survive in some form. Foundations are taking up some of the slack, and concerned citizens are beginning to ask the right questions about the trajectory of journalism in this new century.

Maybe newspapers will die, but if they do some kind of deep local coverage will emerge from the wreckage - including the work that citizen journalists will do - even if it doesn't go as deep as we'd like, at least not right away.

While I'm ardent about the potential of citizen media, there's nothing to guarantee that we emerge from the coming turmoil with an ecosystem that includes many innovators alongside the venerable players.Certainly I don't have clear-cut answers, though I have contempt for a widespread notion - in US journalism executive suites, at least - that wholesale shedding of journalists is a sustainable business model for the long term. Maybe it's the smart move right now, but it ignores the public trust element of journalism and mocks the communities where it's practiced.

The urgency with which some smart people are now discussing this subject
is the best current news. This needs to be a global conversation.
----------------------------------------------------------------

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ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11465

The Blog Rage Canard

What all the MSM complaints are really about.

By Greg Sargent
The American Prospect

Web Exclusive: 05.04.06

In recent weeks, one member after another of the D.C. media establishment
has gone out of his way to depict bloggers as hysterical, angry and
destructive. To hear them tell it, bloggers sitting at their computers are
akin to squalling brats in high-chairs chucking baby food at their sober,
serious elders -- i.e., major figures at the established news
organizations.

Not long ago, The Washington Post.s Jim Brady lamented .blog rage.. Joe
Klein.s latest column complained about .vitriol. and .all the left-wing
screeching.. Former Bill Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry recently
told us that reporters are complaining they feel "intimidated" because
.most of the blogosphere spends hours making them feel that way.. And a
CBS opinion piece recently asked: "Does noise trump contemplation in the
blogosphere?"

What.s all this really about? These skirmishes, obviously, are part of a
much larger war between established opinion-makers and bloggers, in which
the establishment figures continually profess themselves dismayed by the
tone of the blogosphere. It.s a conflict that isn.t going away anytime
soon. But guess what: This fight doesn.t really have anything to do with
the .tone. of the blogosphere at all. Rather, it.s actually about the
efforts of bloggers to establish the legitimacy of their medium, and about
the reluctance of major news organizations and their employees to
recognize that legitimacy.

For the moment, I.d like to put aside the debate over Net-neutrality, and
sidestep the ideological reasons driving this battle, in order to focus on
something I think is more fundamental about this fight. It.s often
observed that the blogosphere constitutes a threat to big news orgs. But
it.s not a threat only for the usual reasons mentioned -- competition for
traffic, the speeding up of the news cycle, etc. Bloggers are also a
threat because they're in the process of making the opinion-generating
profession a purely meritocratic one. And that's the real reason, as I
hope to show, that commentators like Joe Klein and self-appointed
custodians of journalistic standards like Deborah Howell constantly carp
about "tone."

To be sure, some blogospheric elements do make it easier for critics of
the blogosphere to toss out the "tone" red herring. I.m no blog
triumphalist. There's tons of work to do. Some attacks on the MSM are
hysterical and ill-considered. And a fair amount of blogospheric media
criticism is marred by its own hyper-ideological nature, which makes it
that much easier for the targets of the criticism to dismiss it. What's
more, plenty of blogging -- commentary and reporting -- is just not up to
journalistic snuff. Meanwhile, news orgs do sometimes show extraordinarily
high standards or pull off incredible reporting feats that no web site
could ever hope to emulate -- yet.

But the attacks on the blogosphere are nonetheless flawed in a very
fundamental way. The criticism is often premised on the idea that bloggers
are somehow offering something dramatically different from what
commentators like Klein are serving up. But it's not really different.
What Klein, like other commentators, delivers to readers (the column that
appears in the hard copy of Time magazine notwithstanding) is words on a
screen, and of course whatever sensibility, wit, analysis, and
interpretive intelligence he brings to those words.

Now, all of a sudden, anyone can come along and, with little to no
overhead, offer pretty much exactly the same thing. Aside from some
obvious differences -- bloggers sometimes double as political activists,
and the idiom is different in some ways -- the truth is that bloggers
essentially offer exactly what Klein does: Words on a screen which are
meant to help the reader interpret current affairs and politics. What.s
more -- and here.s the real crux of the matter -- readers are choosing
between the words on a screen offered by Klein and other commentators and
the words on a screen offered by bloggers on the basis of one thing alone:
The quality of the work.

Before, Joe Klein and his colleagues enjoyed an exclusive perch, one that
was maintained for them by the folks who controlled the systems that,
previously, were the only ways commentary and news were disseminated. One
could argue that columnists earn their perches -- through hard work,
experience and, occasionally, talent. But once they attain their position,
their status is more or less protected -- both by the fact that news orgs
rarely fire columnists and by the kind of de facto gentleman.s agreement
that has long kept columnists from attacking each other too aggressively.

The blogosphere has shattered that comfy arrangement -- permanently. All
of a sudden, there.s no longer a system in place that allows columnists to
grow lazy, sloppy, or biased without facing consequences. Suddenly it's
possible to pinpoint a commentator.s weak reasoning or inaccuracies and
broadcast them far and wide. Suddenly underperforming columnists, and
their editors, are no longer insulated from competition -- from bloggers
who, as hard as this may be for established commentators to accept,
actually do work that.s as good or better than they do. I'd put up Josh
Marshall, Kevin Drum, Digby, Billmon and others up against many mainstream
columnists in America any day. Atrios -- who tends towards short form and
makes choices partly for political punch . has as finely-tuned a sense of
what stories will be big and controversial as any news editor does. And
the comparison occasionally holds up with reporters, too. Murray Waas
offers purely Internet-based investigations that are every bit as good as
some of what you read on WashingtonPost.com, and is certainly better than
much of the investigative reporting you see by the major networks.

Yet Klein and other internet critics refuse to acknowledge this. Their
criticism deliberately blurs the distinction between crappy, substandard
work on blogs and high-quality work that stands toe to toe with much
offered by major news orgs. The obvious subtext of their attacks is that
there is something inherently wrong with content delivered via the
blogosphere -- it's unruly, unpoliced territory, and bloggers themselves
in any case are overly emotional or have questionable motives -- and
therefore, everything puglished there should be seen as suspect. The
content offered by main news organizations, by contrast, should be
presumed to have validity. The blanket criticism of the "tone" of the
blogosphere is driven by a refusal to acknowledge the substantive,
high-quality content being offered -- it's all about tarring the
blogosphere with one brush. Klein blasted .frothing. and .screeching.
bloggers . when in fact, much of the criticism of him was measured,
well-researched, and well-reasoned.

The good news is that this effort to paper over the distinction between
bad blogging and the top-notch work that's being done is failing. Right
now, readers are undeniably evaluating work based on its merits -- on its
sensibility, wit, analysis, and intelligence -- rather than based on how
it's reaching them or who.s publishing it. Readers see that some bloggers
do high-quality journalism and are concluding that the mere fact that it.s
reaching them via blogs doesn.t diminish the worth of that work in any way
whatsoever. Readers are turning to bloggers to do what a handful of
exalted columnists and their editors once did exclusively . that is,
interpret the world for them. And that, not the tone or the supposedly
destructive streak of bloggers, is the thing that.s really intimidating to
the "MSM" about the blogosphere.

Greg Sargent, a contributing editor at New York magazine, writes bi-weekly
for The American Prospect Online. He can be reached at
greg_sargent@newyorkmag.com.

© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.

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

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Consider why this sarcastic take-down of President Bush allegedly went largely
uncovered by the mainstream media.

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1529981/20060502/index.jhtml

Stephen Colbert's Attack On Bush Gets A Big 'No Comment' From U.S. Media

05.02.2006 3:46 PM EDT

Mainstream outlets largely ignore Comedy Central host's scathing remarks at
White House dinner.
Stephen Colbert speaks at the White House Correspondents Association dinner
in Washington, D.C., on Saturday

By Gil Kaufman
Posted at: MTV.COM

Hey, did you hear about the White House Correspondents Association dinner
last weekend?

Oh, yeah, that cute thing where President Bush parried with a look-alike
and poked fun at himself? That was adorable.
No, not that. Did you hear
the three or four dozen verbal napalm bombs that Comedy Central's Stephen
Colbert laid out for the president at the
annual dinner on Saturday night? No?

Well, maybe it's because much of the mainstream media from CNN to Fox
News, from the "Today" show to The New York Times
ignored or largely glossed over reporting on the stinging zingers Colbert
lobbed Bush's way in favor of brief mentions
of his more innocuous jokes.

Colbert's comments were nothing if not controversial.

During his show-closing roast, Colbert whose TV program, "The Colbert
Report," is built on the premise that he is a
flag-waving Bush apologist looked the president in the eye and let loose a
characteristically blistering barrage of
invective, which was met with a stunned silence by the crowd and reportedly
made the most powerful man in the free world
squirm in his seat on the dais.

Colbert said things like, "Most of all, I believe in this president. Now, I
know there are some polls out there saying
this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay
attention to the polls. We know that polls are
just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in
'reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal
bias. ... Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is
half-empty, because 32 percent means it's two-thirds
empty. There's still some liquid in that glass is my point, but I wouldn't
drink it. The last third is usually backwash."
There was also sarcastic praise for Bush's tendency to stick to his guns.
"The greatest thing about this man is he's
steady. You know where he stands," Colbert said. "He believes the same
thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no
matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never
will."

Colbert stayed in character during his entire monologue, calling Bush his
"hero" and saying, just a minute into his talk,
that being at the correspondents' dinner made him feel like he was
dreaming. "Somebody pinch me," he said, setting up a
sharp left jab to Vice President Dick Cheney. "You know what? I'm a
pretty sound sleeper, that may not be enough.
Somebody shoot me in the face."

No aspect of the president's troubles over the past year was given a pass:
From the NSA spying scandal ("If anybody needs
anything at their tables, speak slowly and clearly on into your table
numbers and somebody from the NSA will be right
over with a cocktail"), to the premature declaration of "Mission
Accomplished" in Iraq he made three years ago to the
disastrous government response to Hurricane Katrina.

"I stand by this man because he stands for things," Colbert said. "Not only
for things, has he stood on things. Things
like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And
that sends a strong message: that no matter what
happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged
photo ops in the world."
One reason for the media's reluctance to report Colbert's comments could be
that some were directed at them.

"Here's how it works," he said. "The president makes decisions, he's the
decider. The press secretary announces those
decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make,
announce, type. Put them through a spell-check
and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write
that novel you've got kicking around in your
head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the
courage to stand up to the administration. You
know, fiction."

He also took some broad slaps at Fox News, saying the news station gives
you every side of a story: "the president's side
and the vice president's side."

Not surprisingly, Colbert got a chilly reception after the speech from the
president and his wife. According to an
account in Editor and Publisher, "as Colbert walked from the podium, when
it was over, the president and first lady gave
him quick nods, unsmiling. The president shook his hand and tapped his
elbow, and left immediately."
More surprising has been the chilly reception his speech the sentiment of
which was very much in line with any number
of editorials that appear in major American periodicals every week has
received from the mainstream media. Some outlets
have essentially treated him as they would a heckler; others criticized his
failure to observe the decorum of the annual
dinner, the jokes of which traditionally stop well short of Colbert's level
of intensity.

Writing in a blog on the Web site of the conservative magazine National
Review, reporter Stephen Spruiell suggested that
the virtual media blackout was not a result of the press protecting Bush,
but rather their colleague, Colbert.
"I like Stephen Colbert as someone who watches cable news every day, I
find his pundit-show satire is dead-on,"
Spruiell wrote. "But his routine at the WHCD was not funny. It was not
effective satire, either. It meandered all over
the place, ending with the usual leftist critique of the reporters who
cover the White House: that, with the exception of
Helen Thomas, they are an uncritical bunch of stenographers who rarely
challenge the administration's line on anything.
... The jokes bombed because the truth in comedy is what makes it funny.

"The lefty bloggers who are now complaining believe that Colbert's critique
of the White House press corps was accurate,
but by and large they also believe that the Bush administration is a
criminal enterprise and that all reporters should be
spouting invective and accusations at press conferences like Helen
Thomas."

Elizabeth Fishman, assistant dean for academic affairs at the Columbia
School of Journalism and a former "60 Minutes"
producer, had a different explanation for the media's favoring of the skit
with Bush and his impersonator. "I thought
some of the things he said were more provocative than what I've
typically seen," she said. "But from working in
television news, the quick hit whether it's morning or evening news shows
is to have the Bush impersonator standing
next to him. It's an easier set up for visual effect."

However, Columbia School of Journalism professor Todd Gitlin begged to
differ. "It's too hot to handle," said Gitlin, who
teaches journalism and sociology. "He was scathing toward Bush and it was
absolutely devastating. They don't know how to
handle such a pointed and aggressive criticism." Gitlin said the criticism
was so harsh that its omission from most major
news outlets made it all the more remarkable.

"I think this is a case of a media who have tiptoed away from the embrace
of the administration and are now reluctant to
take what would seem to them a deeper plunge into the wilderness of
criticism," Gitlin said. "When Bush makes fun of
himself, it's within a very narrow and limited framework. But Colbert's
digs went to some of [Bush's] fundamental
incapacities."
© 2006 MTV Networks. © and TM MTV Networks. ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED.

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specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available
in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First
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http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002462017

Letter Reveals Reason for Firing of Vermont AP Chief

By Joe Strupp
Editor & Publisher Online

Published: May 03, 2006 12:10 PM ET

NEW YORK -- Former Associated Press Vermont bureau chief Chris Graff,
whose firing for unannounced reasons in March sparked statewide protests
from journalists and public officials, was terminated for distributing a
column by Sen. Patrick Leahy that promoted open public records, according
to his termination letter obtained by E&P today.

The letter, written by AP Northern New England Regional Bureau Chief Larry
Laughlin, revealed that Graff, a 27-year veteran of the Vermont bureau,
lost his job because he distributed the column, which was eventually
pulled from the AP wire.

"This is to inform you that your employment at the Associated Press is
terminated," the March 20 letter begins. "The AP has a proud tradition of
speed, accuracy and impartiality that has made it the most trusted news
gathering organization in the world. Your decision to allow an elected
official's editorial comments to run unfettered on the wire March 8
compromised the integrity and impartiality of the AP's news report."

When Graff was fired, widespread speculation surfaced in Vermont that the
Leahy column had been the reason. Neither Graff nor AP officials had
previously commented on the cause. But Graff, who released the letter
today, said the "elected official" cited in it refers to Leahy and his
column. Many in Vermont news circles had been puzzled that the Leahy
column would prompt a firing since a similar Leahy column on the same
topic had been distributed by Graff's bureau a year earlier with no
repercussions.

The termination letter, which was released by Graff as part of a severance
agreement struck between AP and Graff last week, also notes an alleged
misstep in 2003. That year, Graff allowed a staffer, David Gram, to write
a chapter for a book on Howard Dean. The book, published by the nearby
Times-Argus and Rutland Herald, included submissions from nine different
reporters who had covered Dean in the past.

Laughlin's letter referred to that decision as "a failure in judgment,"
noting that he was "admonished" for allowing it at the time. "Both
incidents could have been avoided by consulting with your supervisors,
specifically me," Laughlin added. "When viewed either independently or in
totality, these grave violations of the AP's policies, procedures and
specific directives supply just and sufficient cause for the termination
of your employment."

Graff said he could not comment on the letter, the reason for his
termination or any other aspect of his severance as part of the agreement.
But he said he had asked that he be allowed to release the letter to
"answer some of those lingering questions" about his departure.

Laughlin and AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll could not immediately be
reached for comment Wednesday. Jack Stokes, an AP spokesman at its New
York headquarters, declined comment.

Since his firing, Graff, who is married and the father of two grown
children, has taken part-time positions with Vermont Public Radio and
Vermont Public Television. "I am still talking to folks to sort out what I
want to do next," Graff, 52, told E&P. "I have to see if we will stay in
Vermont, if that is an option. It is going to be a several-months
process."

UPDATE

In response, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) released the following statement
this afternoon:

.If anything, this letter makes AP.s decision all the more difficult to
accept and understand.

.Those of us in public life never agree with all the news coverage we
receive. But within the two rough-and-tumble professions of public service
and journalism, I have never heard anything but praise about Chris Graff
for his professionalism and his evenhandedness, and he has earned that
praise.

.The ironies of censoring discussion of the public.s right to know --
during Sunshine Week, to boot -- have already been noted by others.

.But it must also be noted that AP itself takes an advocacy position each
year during Sunshine Week. AP bureaus across the country distribute and
also produce materials in which these issues are examined. At a Senate
Judiciary Committee hearing that we recently held, a prominent AP witness
testified . and forcefully -- in support of the public.s right to know and
of the bipartisan FOIA reform bills that I have authored and introduced in
the Senate with one of the Senate.s most conservative Republican members.

.Earlier this year the American Society of Newspaper Editors once again
asked for my observations for Sunshine Week, which they distributed to
every newspaper in the country. Making the incidental effort to ensure
that Vermont.s editors were aware of this was, apparently, Chris Graff.s
.mistake,. in the view of his supervisor.

.The letter.s explanation is all the more amazing because the piece that I
wrote and that Mr. Graff simply called to Vermont.s editors. attention is
all about the public.s right to know, calling on the government to be more
open with the press and the public. Since Sunshine Week, and to this day,
I still have not seen anyone venture forth with any column arguing
otherwise, that the government these days is sharing too much information
with the press and the public..
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Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.
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