Westervelt Blog

Former Columnist to Speak at Harvard January 14, 2006

Former San Jose Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor will be leading the weekly Fellows Luncheon on Jan. 17 at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.  Gillmor’s topic is citizen media. He is founder of The Center for Citizen Media, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. The center has a broad mission to “help to enable and encourage grassroots media, especially citizen journalism, at every level.” It will be interesting to see how it refines its focus out the door. Let’s hope it opens up a discussion about ethical blogging, the formation of blogging networks and helps expound on the differences between a traditional newspaper report and one from a random blogger.

There’s also a webcast.

Will Newspapers Survive? Nope January 12, 2006

This Commentary piece by Joseph Epstein, an essayist and former lecturer at Northwestern University, lays a dizzying blow to reporters and the future of newspapers. A writer with conservative political views, Epstein’s columns also appear in The Weekly Standard.

First the numbers he presents are pretty damning:

“Four-fifths of Americans once read newspapers; today, apparently fewer than half do. Among adults, in the decade 1990-2000, daily readership fell from 52.6 percent to 37.5 percent. From 1999 to 2004, according to the Newspaper Association of America, general circulation dropped by another 1.3 million.�

Then the commentary:

“… if I had to prophesy, my guess would be that newspapers will hobble along, getting ever more desperate and ever more vulgar. More of them will attempt the complicated mental acrobatic of further dumbing down while straining to keep up, relentlessly exerting themselves to sustain the mighty cataract of inessential information that threatens to drown us all.�

Ouch.

But the piece makes sweeping characterizations of reporters, calling the current crop coming from schools where “the reigning politics are liberal, and along with their degrees, and their sense of enlightened virtue, they emerge with locked-in political views.â€? This is simply not true. I knew many reporters with conservative and even Libertarian views and this didn’t appear to affect their reporting.

It also assumes that “much of contemporary journalism functions through leaks.� I wish there was a town or city beat reporter out there who could bring this guy on their rounds. Stop at city hall. Ruminate through deeds, schematic drawings and other heady documents for news. To finish out the day, they could bring him to the police station to get the police blotter. And I’d hope that once the reporter sat down to write a story something blares over the police scanner, further extending the 50+ hour day.

Nevertheless you can’t dispute the numbers. Something’s got to change.

Special thanks to the Thoughts on Paper Blog for Epstein’s alternative viewpoint.

The Public’s Right To Know January 6, 2006

I fully agree with former San Jose Mercury News columnist, Dan Gillmor on this issue. The New York Times was right in publishing information about the top-secret National Security Agency electronic surveillance program. Now it is possible the reporters and editors at the Times will be dragged into court by the Department of Justice, and could spend time in jail for failing to divulge their sources on the story. Government eavesdropping on its citizens without any checks and balances is inexcusable in my opinion and the public has the right to know that this is happening. Our freedoms are being called into question here and we should watch the investigation closely.

Wikipedia has a very nice overview of the examples of ethical dilemmas reporters face when balancing national security and the public’s right to know.

Journalist Clears Blogging Hurdles for HIV Project January 3, 2006

Freelance journalists are finding that blogs can and do provide a new medium for showcasing important and top-notch professional work. LivesinFocus.org is the result of a journalism blog project that reflects the melding of blogging and journalism.

The blog was organized by Sandeep Junnarkar, a freelance journalist who decided to report on how a new patent law in India affected the lives of HIV-positive patients and their families when trying to get and pay for medical care. Junnarkar and his colleague Srinivas Kuruganti, a photographer, took portraits and interviewed on video more than two dozen men, women and children in India.

The resulting blog is a professional account of the struggles being faced by HIV-positive patients and their families complete with ways the public can respond with contributions. It’s a testament to how solid journalism and reporting skills can overcome the current limits of the Internet blog.

In his column in USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review, Junnarkar discusses the difficulties of starting a journalism blog, getting funding and building a readership for his project. Perhaps the most important part of beginning his project was putting legitimacy behind it in the form of an official proposal and a summary of his prior work with the New York Times, CNET and as a visiting professor at the Indiana University School of Journalism. Word of mouth among family and friends helped Junnarkar get the ball rolling, but a post about the project at Instapundit.com led to an interview with a BBC program resulting in a surge of project donations. Search engine optimization also played a role, however Junnarkar admits that his blog isn’t fully optimized.

Blog Censorship January 3, 2006

What do you get when a blogger network bends to political or commercial pressures? Censorship.

Microsoft is now in the hot seat for pulling the plug on a controversial Chinese blog hosted on its MSN Spaces portal. Rebecca Mackinnon, a research fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, points out Microsoft’s decision to pull plug on Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti’s “edgy� blog.  Anti is known for quitting his job at the Beijing Daily News after the top editors were fired for increasingly daring investigative coverage, according to Mackinnon. You can find her full blog entry with updates here.

It’s unclear whether Microsoft will reverse its course, but what is crystal clear is that we’re walking into increasingly gray area as the number and scope of blogs continue to rise. How will blog hosting domains such as MSN Spaces oversee its plethora of blogs? What ethical guidelines exist when determining if a blogger is being irresponsible? As we watch blogging networks continue to evolve, I hope a discussion ensues on these issues. Do bloggers really have freedom of speech on private networks? Even if you have your own domain name and servers, you probably are still bound somewhat by your Internet service provider.

Structuring blog chaos January 2, 2006

Both the BBC and the New York Times have good stories discussing the evolution of blogs and how they are changing news reporting and gathering. Citizen journalists are easily getting the tools, from camera cell phones to tiny mp3 players with microphones, and are producing very intriguing stories.

The BBC points to companies such as Scoopt and Spy Media that are becoming intermediaries for citizen journalists to negotiate rights to their content. Other sites are also giving community journalism a bigger sounding board, including Wiki News and Pajamas Media, which are attempting to bridge the differences between traditional news outfits and the type of reporting found on blogs.

The New York Times points out that blogs are forcing “journalists to respond in a variety of ways, including becoming more open about their methods and techniques and perhaps more conscious of how they filter information.� This is a good result of the blogging revolution and bloggers should be proud of this feat.

What remains to be seen is how different blogs will be parsed out and whether corporate blogs can be appropriately discerned from independent blogs. A discussion is already brewing about how major corporations could use blogs to build a community around products as many software vendors are already doing. Not only does it build a community atmosphere, but it opens a dialogue with users to improve communication and more efficiently create new products and features.

Dan Gillmor, a former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News will be heading the Center for Citizen Media starting in 2006. Hopefully the organization will open up a discussion about blogging ethics, whether search engines are structuring blog search results efficiently, and how the vast swarm of blogs can be appropriately structured into networks. Creating blog networks is one way to add structure and some permanence to the current blog chaos.

As we see blog networks and associations crop up, it is unclear what guidelines will be established to make them viable long into the future. AOL purchased Weblogs Inc. for $25 million this year. The company attempted to put together the strongest blogs on the Internet. What AOL will do with the sites remains unclear. AOL has given full editorial control and independence to Weblogs Inc., but it will integrate the blogs into its AOL.com portal by linking to the best entries. (What constitutes the best entry? And who chooses this?) Other blog network sites are forming, including 9rules, which pulls together blogs on myriad topics based on content and layout.

Journalism: 2005 Year in Review January 1, 2006

It’s a new year for journalism. Time for newspapers to pick up the pieces, cable news networks to examine themselves, and the public to consider the changing ways we get our news.

The state of journalism managed to shine through the predicaments that resulted in increased criticism of the news media in 2005. Dan Rather was ousted from his CBS anchor position for a sloppy news report, reporter Judith Miller was jailed for contempt, which further eroded the stature of the New York Times and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was put on the hot seat for discussing the Valerie Plame case as if he had no involvement in the matter.

Yet, for all the criticism of the news media, coverage of the war in Iraq and the skirmishes in Afghanistan continued to shine in 2005. Reporters continued to risk their lives in these war zones to tell the whole story of the problems in the region. Reporters also helped show the problems here at home. When the federal government was slow to respond to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the public was able to watch the horrors unfold on television. Despite all their solid coverage of Hurricane Katrina, cable news networks continued to sink to new lows in 2005 with continued coverage of glamorous court cases, celebrity gossip, missing persons, car chases, explosions, fires, and other ‘big splash’ events to gain television ratings.

2005 Highlights:

Satellite Radio: Sirius and XM radio added millions of listeners to their subscription-based model in 2005. It’s still not clear how Satellite radio will alter news coverage or change traditional radio as we know it.

Blogs: For all the biased blogs out there, there are bloggers who try to stick to the middle. Readers are becoming more savvy at finding unbiased news coverage and turning to a number of blogs for insightful analysis. It’s fair to say that the blogs also push the traditional media to improve its reporting.

Peter Jennings: Died this year after battling lung cancer.

Ted Koppel: The host of ABC’s Nightline stepped down.

Dan Rather: Left the anchor chair.

Iraq: Reporters continue to risk their lives to cover this war.

Valerie Plame: Shined the light on how government officials sometimes mingle too closely with our nation’s top reporters

Watergate: Mark Felt let out his secret, telling the public he is the famous “Deep Throat.�

Bob Woodward: Continues to deal with criticism over his role in the Plame case while commenting as if he was not involved.

Hurricane Katrina: Reporters covered the government’s slow response and the resulting chaos in the days and weeks that followed.

Citizen Journalism at its Best December 29, 2005

An Alaskan Airlines flight lost pressure in its cabin yesterday, forcing air masks to drop into passengers’ laps. The real story here is that a citizen journalist captured some photographs on his camera phone and then wrote about it in his blog.

“We were all gripped in silence, surrounded by the white noise from the engines that eerily engulfed the plane into a surreal atmosphere. And as the oxygen masks deployed from the ceiling in a familiar, video-esque manner, we all grasped them in fear – trying to figure out how to breathe through the flimsy pieces of plastic. Parents were the most confused – as the masks were too large for their babies’ faces and were not easy to put on in such a panicked situation. The next few minutes passed like seconds – the plane started diving down to a lower level … and fast,â€? wrote Jeremy Hermanns, who calls himself a search engine specialist.

This kind of writing/reporting is representative of the future of the Internet, where millions of bloggers cover issues ranging from politics to wine and other niche areas. The key is trying to parse out the online journals or diaries to place them in a different category. Unfortunately, I don’t see this being done yet in a very efficient way. Today, blogs are snowballed together and perhaps for a reason – many blogs offer a mixture of personal diary type writing with an occasional report or eye-catching story thrown in. I’m not sure there’s a real answer here, other than better search tools and more efficient organization of blog search results. The parsing would also have to include corporate blogs, fan club blogs, and others to discern authoritative blogs from the rest. Who will have this responsibility? This is not an easy question.