In just four years, everyone on earth may be an author. When books were the dominant form of publishing, a small minority of the world’s population had their words published. Now, Twitter, Facebook, and social networking sites are making authors into the majority. From the year 1400 to 2000, according to Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow in Seed, the number of published authors rose by tenfold every century. For the past decade, authorship has grown by tenfold every year. Eventually, the authors predict that everyone on earth will be published.

Near-universal authorship is changing society, Pelli and Bigelow write. People are “trading privacy for influence,” and businesses and governments are being forced to adapt to the power that individuals now wield. People who fret about illiteracy throughout the world may soon extend their concern to people who can’t publish.

That concern is misguided, Albert Jay Nock writes for the American Conservative. Universal literacy creates near-universal mediocrity in literature, according to Nock. Teaching the world to read creates a market for schlock that forces worthwhile literature out of the market. In the article, which is fittingly behind a paywall, Nock writies:

The average literate person being devoid of reflective power but capable of sensation, his literacy creates a demand for a large volume of printed matter addressed to sensation; and this form of literature, being the worst in circulation, fixes the value of all the rest and tends to drive it out.

Nock laments mass literacy for the bad writing it creates. He should prepare for mass authorship.

Source: Seed, American Conservative (subscription required)

Image by  Foxtongue , licensed under  Creative Commons .

UPDATE: We tried to reach Albert Jay Nock for a comment, but found the conversation a trifle one-sided. Indeed, Nock has been dead for more than half a century. We regret the error.

Far from the cozy classrooms of American journalism schools, students are venturing to remote and often dangerous parts of the world to learn how to dig up a scoop. The Ryerson Review of Journalism reports on one program that embedded students with soldiers in Iraq. Another school sent students to electronic waste dumps in Ghana, India, and China, potentially exposing them to toxic chemicals and roving bandits.

One student have hailed her out-of-the-classroom experience as “probably one of the best experiences I’ve had in journalism.” The programs have horrified others, including Klaus Pohle of Carleton University, who called the Iraqi embed trip “terribly irresponsible.”

What do you think? Should journalism students visit dangerous parts around the world? Or should war zones be left to the professionals?

Source: Ryerson Review of Journalism 

According to a post on the Guardian's digital technology blog, "news sites average around 450 links on their homes pages, whereas 10 years ago they averaged just 12 links per home page." And you're probably clicking on those links. What does it all mean? The New York Times interface specialist and lead researcher, Nick Bilton, spells it out:

If you pick up a US or UK newspaper you'll see four to six stories on the front page and maybe eight to 10 refers to other stories, that's an average total of 12 headlines on one page. In contrast, the average news website has 335 story or section links on their homepage. So we're showing people online 300 more options on one page than we show them in print. And we wonder why people have information overload of content.

…It is a fascinating fact is that if you go online and visit 200 web pages in one day—which is a simple task when you could email, blogs, Youtube, etc.—you'll see on average 490,000 words; War & Peace was only 460,000 words.

(Thanks, A Photo Editor.)

It's that time of year again... We've named the 2009 Utne Reader visionaries and you can read all about them in the November-December issue. If you want more, we've created a list of every Utne visionary with a Twitter account and with one click, they'll show up in your feed.

And while you're clicking, you can add the Utne Reader editorial staff.

Happy tweeting!

The deals are a “stunning one-two punch,” according to All Things Digital: Microsoft announced today that it has struck agreements to integrate real-time feeds of status updates from Twitter and Facebook into Bing. The deals are nonexclusive—which means Google could follow suit—but for the time being, Bing has something the search giant has yet to tap, at least in the case of Facebook. And get this: Microsoft is paying for it—exact terms, of course, haven’t been disclosed.

This is nonetheless “a precedent that the ability of search engines to index and link to content is worth some money,” Ryan Chittum writes for Columbia Journalism Review. “Where this goes from here no one knows. . . . Would the AP yank its news off Google if Bing paid and Google didn’t? Would it be worth it in the lost revenue from not showing up in as many search results? That’s too early to tell.”

One thing is clear, as Chittum says: This will be worth watching.

Sources: All Things Digital, Columbia Journalism Review

"Thus far in American history, the fact that men have escaped an onslaught of advertising for beauty products is a triumph of gender ideology over capitalism," wrote Sociological Images blogger Lisa Wade in a 2008 post. "Companies, after all, could double their market if they could convince men that they, too, were unsightly without make-up." The post examined a few attempting to market make-up for men  and left the matter alone until this week when she discovered a vintage ad by Mennen. Ah, the humiliation of "face shine."

Source: Sociological Images

As retailers like WalMart are shrinking aisle space devoted to magazines, Minneapolis-based Target has launched a bold digital newsstand, a joint project with digital content provider Zinio, reports MinOnline. Consumers can buy single issues or discounted subscriptions, choosing from a largely mainstream selection of publications.

As a company, Zinio has an unlimited-access, “comprehensive device” philosophy: “As the consumer you should only need to buy the digital version of [a publication] one time and have the freedom to access it on every device on an ongoing basis,” Zinio chief marketing office Jeanniey Mullen told MinOnline. So you subscribe, log into your Zinio account from wherever, and the content is formatted for how you've chosen to access it.

“Call it the counterpart to the emerging ‘TV everywhere’ model in which cable and premium network subscribers have online and mobile access to all of their TV programming,” writes MinOnline. It’s a forward-thinking strategy: “The current e-ink technology driving the Amazon Kindle, Sony reader and its upcoming rivals simply are not capable of showing magazines off very well. And while the Amazon Kindle allows for direct subscription and wireless downloads of more than a score of titles, these magazines are formatted specifically for that device.”

Source: MinOnline

Simpsons fans, brace yourselves. The Huffington Post picked up an AP report that Marge Simpson will be on the cover of the November issue of Playboy, available on newsstands October 16, apparently in an attempt to attract 20-something readers into the audience—whose average age is 35.

I hate to ask a perhaps obvious question, but… shouldn’t die-hard Simpsons fans also skew that way? Not that the humor of the longest-running American sitcom doesn’t transcend the ages, but choosing a character from a show that debuted in 1989 and garnered its greatest praise in the 1990s seems a bit of a weird choice for nabbing the 20-something set.

But then there’s really nothing not weird about any of it. Kelsey Wallace over at Bitch catalogs the panoply of unanswered questions:

Honestly, I don't know what is weirdest about this. Is it:

- Playboy thinking that a cartoon character is remotely erotic/sexy to the average reader?

- The Simpsons thinking that putting their animated character on the cover of a nudie magazine is a good idea?

- That the rest of the cover is also laid out in a decidedly creepy “The Simpsons Does Porno” cartoon style? (Sorry Benecio! Bum luck getting in this issue!)

- That Playboy CEO Scott Flanders insists that the three-page spread of Marge inside the magazine contains only “implied nudity”? (Thank goodness, because the real worry here was that we might see a cartoon nip slip.)

- That this all might turn out to be a wild success, proving that I am unknowingly hooked on crazy pills?

Kelsey, you are not hooked on crazy pills. It is Marge, it is Playboy, and it is baffling.

Sources: Huffington Post, Bitch

If you’ve ever fantasized about running a private prison, we have just the video game for you—it’s Prison Tycoon 4: Supermax, a “surprisingly sociological video game” that’s reviewed in the current issue of Contexts (summary only available online).

The Supermax player-as-warden builds a private prison from the ground up, choosing “when and where to build cellblocks, industry, recreation, educational and medical facilities, a chapel, dining halls, staff quarters, guard towers, and fences.” Then the real fun begins, with the day-to-day management of the prison—and that’s where this “remarkably mundane” game is particularly true to life behind bars.

 “Prisons are boring,” the Contexts reviewers explain, especially since, over the past couple of decades, their focus has shifted from rehabilitating inmates to simply managing them (and, in the case of private prisons like the virtual ones in Supermax, profiting from their incarceration). So it’s appropriate that Supermax’s “primary game-player tasks are strikingly tedious, involving little more than creating schedules and allocating inmates to particular cell blocks and workplaces.”  

The Supermax player must balance the same profit-minded motives as private prison companies today: “Such companies can’t spend too much money on rehabilitation programs, security staff or facilities,” the magazine writes, but they must also “maintain order and avoid escapes (something we never did figure out with Supermax) so they don’t lose their government contracts. Without governments providing a steady stream of clients to fill their facilities, profits would evaporate and their businesses would fold.”

There’s no exciting victory at stake here, the reviewers note; the marker of success is simply that you get to keep playing.  

"In real life as in Supermax, then, the success of private prison entrepreneurs in the new era of the new penology isn’t marked by the ‘correction’ of prisoners, but by control and profitability," Contexts concludes. "In this respect, they, too, 'win'—not by rehabilitating prisoners or reforming the penal system, but only by continuing to play the game lucratively."

Source: Contexts 

It happened again. Our humble magazine found its way into a Jon Stewart bit, this time about magazine mergers. The last time that happened we bought monocles and called a friend with a camera . This time, we're just pointing and laughing. If you want to see the segment, you'll find it at the Daily Show website.

You don’t have to be a cross-country skier or a snowboarder to appreciate the Zen-like athleticism of the new sport of cross-country snowboarding. Here’s a hilarious video introduction to this “outsider sport of an outsider sport” from the folks at Fuel TV:

(Thanks, Mountain World.)

Starting at the end of the month the Washington Post is holding a contest to suss out “America’s Next Great Pundit” (that assumes we have one now…). Justin Peters over at Columbia Journalism Review came up with a clever new lineup of reality TV inspired contests the paper could (or might?) roll out next. Peters suggests plotlines for The Next Top Bad Idea, I Live in Georgetown, Get Me Out of Here!, Who Wants to Marry Fred Hiatt?, Impartial Idol, and these two gems:

Newsroom Survivor : Ten reporters are set loose in the Post newsroom and tasked with sticking around for as long as possible without being laid off, reassigned, or forced to appear on an unfunny Web video segment. Watch as participants employ survival strategies such as hiding, marrying up, or impersonating Bob Woodward. The last reporter standing wins a thirteen-week contract and a full set of Kaplan LSAT prep books.

The Apprentices : Fifty civilians are given prestigious, unpaid Post internships and set to work producing a daily newspaper. Each week their tasks get more difficult as another round of salaried and experienced employees gets laid off or bought out. Watch the hilarity as the apprentices guilelessly quote press secretaries, insert themselves into stories, and report on events by watching them on television. There are no winners in this contest.

Source: Columbia Journalism Review

There's a rather inspiring look at Kickstarter over at Poynter:

As journalists face pay cuts and are asked to do more with fewer resources, it has become increasingly difficult for them to find the time and money to pursue large-scale enterprise stories or personal projects.

But some journalists are finding a way to make it work. In recent months, they have raised thousands of dollars on Kickstarter, the crowd-funding journalism site, but it isn't limited to journalists.

Launching projects on the site, journalists say, has given them the opportunity to pursue passions, think entrepreneurially about their work and find new ways of interacting with audiences, not only after completing a project, but while they're working on it.

"The truth is, you can get better results if you tap the collective brain power of a big group of people" on the front end, said Robin Sloan, who has raised about $7,000 more than the $3,500 he set out to raise since launching his book project on the site at the end of August. 

There is hope, friends. Now get out there and ask for some money!

Source: Poynter  

When everything but the news is stripped out of a newspaper, publications tend to look a lot thinner. Inspired by a blog post by Clay Shirky, I decided to perform a “news biopsy” of the today’s issue of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I wanted to separate the news from everything else in there.

I began by buying two copies of the newspaper, cutting them up, and separating the articles. One copy was for the odd-numbered pages, the other was for the evens. I then separated the articles into three categories: “news,” “advertisements,” and “other.” The “other” consisted of the opinion columns, sports, weather, comics, anything that was neither an ad nor reported news.

Here were the results:

News: 3.9 oz
Ads: 4.9 oz
Other: 7.3 oz

I then took the news pile and separated that into two categories: “created” and “acquired” news. The created news was anything with a byline from the Star Tribune. The acquired news consisted of articles sourced from the New York Times, the Associated Press, or anything outside of the Star Tribune.

Here were the results:

Acquired: 1.5 oz
Created: 2.3 oz

The paper fared better than the Columbia Daily Tribune, the paper tested by Shirky, where two-thirds of the news was acquired and only one-third was created. Still, out of more than 16 ounces of newspaper, just 2.3 were news created by the Star Tribune. The rest, according to Shirky:

It’s not news, and it’s not hard to do, and it’s not hard to replace. No one surveying the changes the internet is bringing to the newspaper business is saying “My God, who will tell me about Big 12 football! Where will I find a recipe for spicy chicken wings!”

Source: Clay Shirky 

The New York Times has found a new source of funding for journalism: Isaac Mizrahi-designed raingear. In a memo to the company, New York Times president Scott Heekin-Canedy called the $99 coat and umbrella combo, “a summer sensation for The Times Store,” according to the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary M. Seward. The New York Times has also tried creating a wine club as a way to cure their budget woes.

It’s easy to poke fun at the Times for the coat and the wine club, but Seward writes that this kind of merchandizing is “likely to play a significant role as news organizations scramble to replace print advertising revenue.”

The efforts are “a double edged sword” according to Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review. Newspapers often engage in community building, and events like wine clubs—which USA Today and The Wall Street Journal are also trying—could be seen as an extension of that. And it’s not a big deal if the New York Times sells coats, as long as they use that money to fund cutting-edge journalism. On the other hand, Garber says, “it’s unfortunate that it’s not, strictly speaking, journalism.”

Both the coats and the wine club could also be seen as a replacement for the classified sections of newspapers, a revenue source that has been gutted by free services such as Craigslist. Classified ads, like the coats, had very little to do with journalism beyond funding the newspaper.

The real problem, however, is that media outlets haven’t yet figured out a way to fund their work using journalism. According to Garber, “I don’t know that we’ve proven that people aren’t willing to pay” for news. Newspapers simply haven’t figured out how to do it effectively, so far.

Sources:  Nieman Journalism Lab ,  Columbia Journalism Review  

Image from  the New York Times store . 

What do you think of Utne.com? The editorial staff over here at Utne Reader would love to know. Are there any parts that you particularly like? Or are there parts that you can’t stand? This is your opportunity to help us make our website the best it can be. Here’s a link to the survey: 

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=amuV0qVFBahx9hLiFV4CfQ_3d_3d

Thank you very much for your time and help.

Source: Reader Survey 

A typical fighting season in southern Afghanistan begins in spring and continues through fall. This photo essay by photojournalist Louie Palu in the summer issue of Geist documents last year’s fighting season. It finds the region’s Pashtun people, who know little of life without seasonal warfare, living day to day on the fringes of battle.

As the 2009 fighting season began this past May, Palu returned to Afghanistan to capture what could be the worst season the Pashtun have seen. He writes:

The longer I stay in Afghanistan and the more I see, the fewer answers I have about what is going on there and what the future holds. Back in Toronto I can’t even talk to anyone in a bar, because conversations with people who think they understand Afghanistan just end as heated arguments on the sidewalk.

Source: Geist 

 Image by Louie Palu.

Reporters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and other hostile places around the world face the daily threat of being kidnapped. Knowing how to be kidnapped can increase a person’s chances for survival—or at least that’s the theory behind the Centurion Risk Assessment Services’ Hostile Environment and First Aid Course. Trainers stage a mock abduction using “theatrical pyrotechnics to simulate such things as mortar fire, machine gun crossfire, mines and booby traps, etc. (all kept at a safe distance from the delegates) to simulate a hostile environment.”

The American Prospect’s reporter Tara McKelvey attended the course and picked up some useful tips: “Stay in hotels that do not have underground parking garages (where car bombs can be placed). Bring along a doorstop and jam it under the door in your room. And never argue with checkpoint guards.” Considering that at least 30 journalists were killed last year for doing their jobs, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the two, three, or five day course might be worth the time.

Source:  The American Prospect  (excerpt available online)

Image by  sindesign , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Al Jazeera English broadcasts to 150 million households in over 100 countries—with the exception, until very recently, of North America. As the news service makes headway in the United States and is poised to break into Canada, The Walrus takes an in-depth look at the history and challenges facing Al Jazeera English, “a network that much of North America still considers Terror TV.”

Source: The Walrus

The economy is not “unhealthy” right now. It’s neither “ailing” nor “suffering.” The economy is not an autonomous entity like the human body; it’s made up of people taking actions that have an effect on other people. Anat Shenker-Osorio writes for New Deal 2.0 that talking about the economy like a living, breathing thing deemphasizes the actions of people—including irresponsible bankers—and makes efforts at regulation more difficult.

Most people don’t need external interference until something goes wrong. The same is not true of an economy. But when people say, “the economy shed jobs,” they’re reinforcing the idea of the economy as an autonomous thing. It’s better to say, “more people are unemployed,” or “companies laid people off.” Shenker-Osorio writes:

We personify the economy to our peril. Even as our overt messages insist the economy requires consistent external oversight, our language conveys the economy is an autonomous, self-regulating thing. The more we imply that the economy is something that exists and functions on its own, the less credible are our arguments that there’s no such thing as an unregulated free-market.

Source: New Deal 2.0 

Image by Photos8, licensed under Creative Commons.

For some people, photos on Facebook of wheelchair users having fun, dating, and living a normal life is enough to dispel stereotypes of people with disability. Writing for New Mobility, Jean Dobbs profiles the ways that people with disabilities are using Facebook to date, promote disability organizations, and to advance their careers. Artist Carolyn Stanley Anderson tells the magazine, “It makes us visible in a way that wasn't available before.” 

Source: New Mobility 

An arresting photo essay about the city of Janesville, Wisconsin, published in Mother Jones, serves as a stark illustration of the troubling numbers released in the new national poverty reports. For nearly four generations, the town was home to one of the oldest General Motors factories in the country. The plant abruptly halted its assembly line in December 2008.

The somber photos, taken by Danny Wilcox Frazier, capture Janesville’s remaining residents living like ghosts amid the ruins of a once-booming company town, where a defunct strip club has become a venue for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and empty hotels don’t bother leaving the light on for anyone.

Source: Mother Jones 

Subprime loans are often blamed as the basis of current financial crisis. Thats unfortunate, according to Elinore Longobardi in the Columbia Journalism Review, because subprime describes only the borrower, in unflattering terms, and has nothing to say about the lender.

A better option is to point the finger at predatory lendingthe crooks who made bad loans to vulnerable populations like minorities and the elderly. The press used the term subprime somewhere between seventy or eighty times more frequently than the term predatory lending, according to CJR. That statistic points to the abject failure of the press in predicting the financial crisis, and it places the blame for the crisis in the wrong place.

Source: Columbia Journalism Review (Article not yet available online.)

Image by woodleywonderworks, licensed under Creative Commons.

Got space for thousands of zines? The Papercut Zine Library—which lends an unusual collection of 7,000 zines, indie books, periodicals, and audio/visual materials in addition to hosting community events—is looking for a new home in the Boston/Cambridge area. The collective-run, free lending library lost its space in Cambridge’s Democracy Center on August 15. It had operated there since May 2005.

As outlined on the collective’s Myspace page, Papercut is looking for at least 180 square feet of space in an accessible area. Joining an existing community/arts/organizing space is an option, and so is renting low-cost commercial space. There’s just one absolute: “that the freedom to make decisions about the library’s internal operation stay within our collective. That is, we are not interested in another library absorbing our collective if it means the collective will not be involved.”

Anyone who has ideas or tips should get in touch with Papercut.

Source: Papercut Zine Library

(Thanks, BoingBoing.)

Image by gruntzooki, licensed under Creative Commons.

Iranian bloggers who went online to protest the disputed election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad owe a debt of gratitude to the spiritual dissident group, the Falun Gong, according to Eli Lake in The New Republic.

Falun Gong practitioners working with the Global Internet Freedom Consortium were instrumental in developing an anti-censorship tool called Freegate, which was designed to hide internet activity from the watchful eye of the Chinese government. All mentions of the Falun Gong are heavily censored in China, because, Lake reports, “the Chinese government views the Falun Gong almost the way the United States views Al Qaeda.”

Iranian internet users were able to use the software for a short time to protest the disputed election results, until the tool’s popularity in Iran overwhelmed the group’s servers and they were forced to shut it down.

Freegate is not the only tool that dissidents use to skirt censorship on the web. Lake also mentions the software Tor, profiled in the September-October issue of Utne Reader, an anti-censorship program that is funded in part by the U.S. government. The Falun Gong has urged the United States to fund Freegate, too, but support has not been forthcoming.

As good as programs like Freegate and Tor are at stymieing government censorship, China, Iran, Russia, and other countries are working feverishly on technology to fight back. Lake writes, “the race to beat the Internet censors is a central battle in the global struggle for democracy—a cat-and-mouse game where the fate of regimes could rest in no small measure on the work of the Falun Gong and others who write programs to circumvent Web censorship.”

Source: The New Republic 

Image by  HappyInGeneral , licensed under  Creative Commons .

What would Buffy do—if the beloved (and powerfully feminist) vampire slayer encountered the Twilight series’ Edward Cullen? Video remix artist Jonathan McIntosh has crafted an answer in a beautifully edited video mash-up: Buffy vs. Edward (Twilight Remixed).

Writing on the blog Rebellious Pixels, McIntosh explains that his video remix is more than “a decisive showdown between the slayer and the sparkly vampire.” His piece of transformative storytelling—protected under fair use doctrine—dishes out a “ pro-feminist visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behavior.”

 “Seen through Buffy’s eyes, some of the more sexist gender roles and patriarchal Hollywood themes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed in hilarious ways,” he writes. The remix also functions as “a metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21ist century.”

Watch for yourself:

(Thanks, feministing.)

Source: Buffy vs. Edward, Rebellious Pixels

It’s been an exciting but bumpy ride for the independent press in Eastern Europe in recent years. In the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, things got a bit bumpier this summer: The editorial staff of the Riga-based Baltic Times, an English-language newspaper that covers all three countries, quit en masse in late July because they hadn't been paid in four months and say they were being forced to write articles that favored advertisers, reports Latvians Online.

The encouraging thing is that they did what used to be nearly impossible: They launched a rival publication within weeks.

“Baltic Reports, which was officially launched today [August 25], is an independent online media portal established by former staff of the Baltic Times,” editor Kate McIntosh wrote in an e-mail to supporters.

“We had a disagreement with Riga staff journalists” was the understated characterization of the dispute by Baltic Times managing editor Sergey Alekseyev in an e-mail to Latvians Online. Alekseyev said the publication will continue.

In announcing their resignations, the ex-staff at the Baltic Times acknowledged financial pressures played a role in the drama—but so did journalistic standards: “While we appreciate that these are hard times economically for business and companies, we felt that it was no longer possible to continue to produce a professional product under such circumstances.”

Sources: Latvians Online, Baltic Reports

Image by PhylB, licensed under Creative Commons.

With nothing more than a first and last name, the Personas web application creates a picture of how the internet sees you. Eerie insights sometimes flash across the page, often followed by absurd non sequiturs. The website, created as part of an MIT art installation Metropath(ologies), is meant as a critique of data mining efforts by Google, Netflix, and the U.S. Government. In a statement on the project, the authors say:

We typically are never given the chance to see the decision making process that ranks some webpage in the fourth slot for a specific Google Query, and most certainly not when money is to be made in a competitive environment. Personas is meant to expose this black box process as controlled voodoo.

The visualizations don’t have any live links in them, and you can’t copy and paste from it, which gives the impression of a data interpretation process that the user is powerless to control.

(Thanks, Apples and Owls.)

Source: Personas

When assault rifle toting, anti-health care reform advocates stormed town hall meetings, many people thought it was big news. The bigger story, according to the Pew Research Center, was that Brett Favre was returning to professional football. A full 69 percent of people heard at least something about Favre returning to the NFL, while 66 percent heard about the gun-wielding protesters. Both of those stories trumped the news that former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced that he was pressured into fiddling with the terrorist threat levels for political purposes. Almost half (48 percent) of the people surveyed said they had heard nothing of Ridge’s allegations.

Source: Pew Research Center 

Madison-based magazine The Progressive, an energetic voice of dissent and activism for 100 years, has issued an urgent appeal for funds. Longtime editor Matthew Rothschild is very straightforward about the magazine’s plight, explaining how they got there, what cuts they’ve made, and how they will manage long-term survival after this big fundraising push.

“Let me put it to you straight,” he writes on the magazine’s website. “We desperately need to raise $90,000 in the next two weeks to keep going. We’ve got no money in the bank, and we have payroll to meet on August 31, and our printer to pay, and other creditors hounding us.”  

Since he posted the appeal last week, they’ve already collected about $60,000—two-thirds of what they need—and you can add to the count by donating here.

Even in a lean economy, such an outpouring of financial support isn’t too surprising (though it is, of course, extremely heartening): The Progressive, which celebrated its centennial earlier this year, has a long, strong relationship with its radical readers. It’s a relationship that matters come fundraising time, as feminist magazine Bitch found out last September, when its readers forked over tens of thousands of dollars in a matter of days to keep the magazine going. Meanwhile, music-enthusiast readers of Paste have donated more than $250,000 this year as part of a longer-term fundraising drive.

Madison’s alt-weekly, Isthmus, has more on The Progressive’s crunch.

Sources: The Progressive, Isthmus

Forget putting video in magazines, it's high time we start putting our magazines in videos! That's what the Walrus did with their dramatic animated trailer for the September 2009 issue. It's a novel idea, and it's also an effective one. I was reading Helen Humphreys on the Plains of Abraham mere seconds after the trailer had ended.

Never heard of the Walrus? They won the 2009 Utne Independent Press Award for Best Writing. It's a fabulous magazine. But why take our word for it when you can hear it from Margaret Atwood, Broken Social Scene, Atom Egoyan, and Geddy Lee? They're all together (at last?) in another little video called  Why We Need the Walrus.

Source: Walrus

NBC’s reality show “The Wanted” trails the hunt for war criminals living normal lives, but lately has done more to unearth the complexities of the genocide in Rwanda and the political motivations that inform its reconciliation process.

The Rwandan government has been working closely with the show’s producer, Charlie Ebersol, to capture U.S. professor Leopold Munyakazi for his alleged role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, reports Andrew Rice in the New Republic.

Munyakazi, who claims he was a terrified bystander, sought asylum in the U.S. after he was released from a Rwandan prison. He has since become a very public critic of Kagame’s Rwanda, where reconciliation between perpetrators and survivors is virtually mandated and tough laws against “divisionism” have been enacted.

Rwandan prosecutors have urged the U.S. to return Munyakazi to no avail. “Then, last year, a new possibility arose, one that would allow Rwanda to make its case directly to the American people—on television,” writes the New Republic.

Source:  The New Republic

With the public option clinging to life and the health care debate drowning in a sea of hyperbole and lies, efforts to insert truth and nuance into the debate are constant, if not entirely successful.

Morning Edition spent eight minutes debunking myths about Britain's National Health Service in, which Republican Congressman Charles Grassley says would kill Ted Kennedy if it could only get its hands on him.

The Daily Dish has collected all of its View from Your Sickbed posts in one place. This moving series of posts from Daily Dish readers is as damning an indictment of the current sytem as any I've seen.

Foreign Policy takes the side door into the debate, placing a summary of the decisions that have shaped the current U.S. health care system at the end of a list of the world's worst healthcare reforms.

Meanwhile, the battle to discredit the Obama "death panels" rages. A new poll finds that 57% of Republicans either believe or are "not sure" about the truth of claims that President Obama and supporters of health care would murder the terminally ill. Thank you (again) Sarah Palin.

Sources: Morning Edition, Daily Dish, Foreign Policy 

Image by  José Goulão , licensed under  Creative Commons .

When pundits talk about “class warfare,” they almost exclusively refer to actions taken on behalf of non-rich people. Warfare, though, usually has two sides. Research reported in Extra! found that a “class warfare” story was 18 times more likely to refer to bottom-up activities—like taxing rich people—rather than top-down actions—like dismantling unions. Extra! uncovered plenty of critiques against top-down activities, including bank bailouts and anti-labor policies, but these actions are seldom described as “class warfare.”

Source: Extra! 

Image by Joe Saunders, licensed under Creative Commons.

The standard, bare-bones, institutional voice of newspapers is dying a slow death. “The convention has outlived its usefulness, and needs to be euthanized,” Matt Thompson writes on his blog Newsless. Writing in an institutional “news voice” hinders transparency by forcing reporters to hide their methods and their voice. It also distracts people with the form, rather than the substance, of news articles when reporters deviate from the conventions. It also allowed “partisan hucksters” like Bill O’Reilly to outflank newspapers, according to Thompson, because it’s usually more compelling to be told “I’m on your side” rather than “just the facts, m’am.”

Source:  Newsless  

Earlier this summer, as part of a master’s program at Emerson College, Kerry Skemp began blogging and tweeting about online commentary (i.e., comments left on websites or tweets) and its role in the future of publishing. The resultant blog, You’re Talking a Lot, but You’re Not Saying Anything, is filled with rich observations. For anyone who hasn’t been following all along, Skemp recently summed up the lessons learned with the ultimate “meta-commentary” post: “Commentary on My Commentary on Commentary.”

The distillation is fascinating stuff: a vision of online commentary that rebuffs proverbial complaints of commenters-as-trolls-and-idiots and slays simplistic traffic-building stratagems. “Online commentary both is and affects publishing,” Skemp writes. “It is publishing in the sense that it ‘makes public’ information that would otherwise remain private. In doing so, commentary (ideally) affects more than the commenter and the person being responded to.

“The unique nature of commentary on the internet allows it to be read by an unlimited number of people with varying levels of connection to the topic at hand. An astute comment can educate and inspire others; a negative or uninformed comment can motivate others to help educate. Admittedly, online commentary doesn’t give rise to enlightenment: but it can, and should.”

Finding enlightenment in a comment field might seem a bit farfetched, but Skemp backs up the claim with savvy observations that will be interesting to track as online comment infrastructure evolves. The presence of nasty (or self-serving) commenters, for example, means that “the art of commentary includes determining what to weed out,” a.k.a., a dose of media literacy. Additionally the “Twitterfication of commentary”—knowing who’s reading what you publish—injects accountability into the system, eliminating the anonymity under which bad manners and cheap shots flourish.

But more than commentary shifting toward more refined discourse, Skemp ultimately sees it functioning as a sort of super-discourse. “Commentary is the future of . . . search, and potentially even publishing,” she writes. “Commentary is the future of finding everything we need online, and responding to what is already online. Algorithms can only go so far without the human input that comes in the form of commentary: data showing what people think about other data.”

(Thanks, @R_Nash.)

Source: You’re Talking a Lot, but You’re Not Saying Anything

Image by preater, licensed under Creative Commons.

A literary hoax is raising uncomfortable questions about the state of academic journals.

Back in 2004, the literary-studies journal Modernism/Modernity printed an article by Jay Murray Siskind of Blacksmith College. The problem is that there is no Jay Murray Siskind, outside Don DeLillo’s classic modernist novel White Noise, and Blacksmith College doesn’t exist at all.

The literary hoax was not revealed until this year, when Mark Sample broke the story on his blog, Sample Reality. According to Sample, this long lag raises the question: “Did any regular readers of the journal ever even read, really read, the review?” Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Monaghan takes the argument a step further, asking, “does anyone read any literary-studies articles?”

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Leaving journalism? Let the good people at Time Out New York be your career counselors. After surveying experts in fields like public relations, philanthropy, they've come up with a list of possible next steps for any burned out or burned up journalists. Pick from publicist, editorial strategist, grant writer, project manager, or, my personal favorite (it's always good to have a backup plan): private eye. Is it as easy all over the country as it is in New York City to make that particular leap? Just a 2-hour walk-up test and $400!

This is no laughing matter of course. We want and need journalists to stay journalists—the good ones at least. 

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Source:  Time Out New York  

Image by  ankarino , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Liars beware: Intel is developing an application that can detect lies on the internet. Install Dispute Finder into a Firefox web browser and the application will scan web pages to ferret out inaccuracies, crackpot theories, and suspicious content. The application highlights the disputed claims and suggests alternative news sources that might help set the record straight. The current version of Dispute Finder relies on people tagging disputed claims, but soon, according to Intel researcher Rob Ennals interviewed on NPR’s On the Media, an algorithm will be used to scan the entire web for any inaccuracies. (Wait, there are inaccuracies on the internet?)

Researchers also hope to launch a real-time “Bullshit Detector” that will scan statements made in real life. Ennals explained:

So let's say you’re in a conversation with somebody and they tell you something which is disputed. The device is going to buzz in your pocket and let you know that you just heard something disputed and perhaps you should question it.

You can watch a demonstration of the Dispute Finder below:

Source: On the Media 

Did you hear the story about Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper taking communion and then stashing the wafer in his pocket? Don’t get your hackles raised yet: The faux pas apparently never happened. Over at the venerable Columbia Journalism Review, Craig Silverman dissects how such a strange fabrication could have ended up on the front page of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal.

Source: Columbia Journalism Review

Image by dtcchc, licensed under Creative Commons.

Google and other internet companies base their businesses on giving things away for free. Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, has stepped up as the primary cheerleader for this kind of business model. For newspapers, however, this model doesn’t work so well. In an interview with the German newspaper Spiegel, Anderson admits, “In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby.”

This doesn’t worry Anderson too much, however. He says, “If something has happened in the world that's important, I'll hear about it. I heard about the protests in Iran before it was in the papers because the people who I subscribe to on Twitter care about those things.”

Source: Spiegel 

Image by Daquella manera, licensed under Creative Commons.

Opponents of health care reform say that the Democrats are trying to impose “Canadian-style health care” on the United States. They warn of long lines, delayed or denied care, and restrictive bureaucracy. A recent attack ad features a Canadian woman claiming, “If I had relied on my government for health care, I’d be dead.” 

The hyperbolic ad is proving effective at eroding support for health care reform among people of all parties, according to Media Curves. The research firm showed pro- and anti- reform ads to 611 people and found that the attack ad was far more convincing.

The anti-reform message is compelling—and entirely misleading. Maureen Taylor reported to On the Media that the star of the attack ad did not, in fact, have brain cancer. And the woman’s life was not threatened by her condition.  Taylor, a health care reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, questions why the idea of Canada is so threatening. She pleads, “People, I'm not walking over a lot of dead bodies here on my way into the studio.”

Source: Media Curves, On the Media 

When This American Life founder and host Ira Glass addressed the University of North Texas's fifth annual Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, he had a few hopeful words about the future of journalism. I keep a list here at Utne Reader of every sputtering mouth that bemoans the "death of journalism" and at the end of this year I'm going to travel the country with the world's largest role of duct tape. Everybody on my list will have their mouths covered (I promise I'll be gentle) and their hands secured behind their backs (and away from their keyboards). Ira Glass, you will be free to continue as you were.

Hmph, that was a little creepy. Apologies. Here's an excerpt from a Dallas Observer report on Glass' address:

Glass focused his lecture on the beauty of a good narrative story, but also gave some practical advice. Glass threw the journalists in the room an idea for future survival based on Jon Stewart's Daily Show. Glass imagined a future for journalism "where you would have the tone of the Daily Show—talking in normal language, but they would be real reporters."

As an example, he played a segment from his radio show where a reporter found a way to make a piece on the mortgage crises mesmerizing. The reporter recorded her attempts to find the person who was supposed to be in charge of oversight for the industry that collapsed. Each person she spoke to sent her to somebody else. Throughout the piece, she used chatty sentences to talk to the listener, like, "It sounds crazy, right?"

"I can imagine that would be a place that journalism could move towards and survive," said Glass, suggesting a casual conversation would replace the medium's more "stiff" formalities. "I feel like it's a great time, because it's wide-open."

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Source: Dallas Observer 

Image by Nancy Updike.

A television commercial for an Israeli telecom company has inspired a rare form of criticism: a real-life re-enactment. In the original, a group of Israeli soldiers jump from their vehicle in a panic when a soccer ball soars over the concrete "separation wall" and lands on their hood. A soldier kicks the ball back over the wall and a pass game breaks out between the soldiers and the invisible Palestinians. Responding the levity of it all, Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, told Reuters: "The barrier separates families and prevents children from reaching schools and clinics. Yet the advertisement presents the barrier as though it were just a garden fence in Tel Aviv." 

A video response posted to YouTube is a chilling illustration of Tibi's critique. In it, a group of Palestinians kick a soccer ball over a portion of the West Bank barrier, and are answered with tear gas canisters fired from Israeli positions.

Here is the original commercial:

And here is the response:

Source: Haaretz 

Alt Wire   is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Eyeteeth and Minnesota Independent editor Paul Schmelzer.

Seed bombs: We've all heard of seed bombs—clumps of seed-embedded earth tossed into abandoned lots by guerrilla gardeners—but here are two new takes. Korean artist Jin-wook Hwang imagines actual cluster bombs that disperse seeds in the air to combat desertification (via Another Limited Rebellion), likening the action to that of Gale "Candy Bomber" Halvorson, an American World War II pilot who dropped candy from his plane for the children of Berlin. Japanese-born Hiroshi Sunairi, an NYU art professor, is sharing hibaku seeds—literally, "A-bombed seeds," ancestors of those affected by the bombing of Hiroshima—for people around the world to plant and tend. The persimmons, Japanese holly, jujubes and other varieties have been sprouting in places as far flung as London, Geneva, New York, Holland (Mich.), Joetsu City (Japan) and Minneapolis—where I'm tending my persimmon. The project's documentation will be exhibited at the New York Horticultural Society this December.

The Visual News: Two of my favorite sites for considering the visual aspects of the news are Michael Shaw's BAGnewsNotes and No Caption Needed, by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. The former recently republished an MSNBC photo entitled, "Last-second Escape"—which shows a U.S. Marine diving to avoid an explosion in Afghanistan—noting that the headline misleads: while one escaped, two other Americans were killed by the IED. Shaw calls it "an example of the disconnect between these wars we keep getting ourselves into and the all-too-familiar tendency to deny or romanticize." The latter has recently looked into news imagery of fallen soldiers returning to their home countries, finding that too often this somber ritual reflects a "radical isolation."

Street screeds (and other free-culture gems): UBUWEB is a wonderful trove of cultural resources, from the just-posted 1983 video, "Martha Rosler Reads Vogue" (in which she deconstructs messages in the ads and content of the fashion magazine), Craig Baldwin's film-collage Sonic Outlaws (a must-see for culturejammers, DJs and copyleft activists), and an incredible gallery of NYC street flyers—hand-made posters that range in theme from the political to the philosophical (here's one by a woman who thanks supporters for helping her win the U.S presidency three times—in 1973-1/2, 1976-1/2 and 1999-1/2.)

Pity the Nation: While it feels like a Bush-era remnant, Staceyann Chin's reading of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem Pity the Nation—with its reference to a "nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves"—never fails to give me chills, and should serve as a reminder to stay vigilant.

Mashups for peace: If Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" can peacefully (and rhythmically) coexist with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (thanks to DJ Morgoth), can't we all? Here are two more new lion-and-lamb mash-ups: Yes-meets-Sir Mix-a-Lot in "Owner of a Lonely Butt" by Minneapolis artist Richard Barlow. And Jay-Z meets Thom Yorke in New York DJ Max Tannone's Jaydiohead: The Encore.

Bio: Minneapolis-based writer and editor Paul Schmelzer blogs about art and activism at Eyeteeth: A Journal of Incisive Ideas; by day he is editor of the Minnesota Independent. He recently moderated Designing Obama, a panel hosted by the Walker Art Center.

Twitter will not single-handedly save journalism. It’s also not silly and dumb. “The single greatest export on the internet—greater, even, than information—is hyperbole,” Paul Constant writes for the Stranger, and the reactions to Twitter have dolled out hyperbole with gusto. Constant, a former Utne Reader contributor, dissects the Twitter phenomenon, the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash, in messages of fewer than 140 characters. He also includes some great insights into internet culture. Here are some excerpts: 

A great deal of time on the internet is spent finding different ways to say, "Oh, you didn't know that already? Huh. I've known for ages." 

Here's another truth: Nobody has any clue what's going on. That's why sneering at Twitter is worse than blindly loving Twitter.  

Historically, very little has been accomplished by being cynical (maybe some broken hearts have been prevented, but at what cost?).

Source: The Stranger 

Newspapers are being written off by scores of pundits like Clay Shirky, but author, McSweeney’s publisher, and Utne Visionary Dave Eggers is standing up for them. In an interview with Salon, Eggers says the young people he teaches in his 826 Valencia writing program give him hope:

“I think there’s a future where the Web and print coexist and they each do things uniquely and complement each other, and we have what could be the ultimate and best-yet array of journalistic venues. I think right now everyone’s assuming it’s a zero-sum situation, and I just don’t see it that way.

“Our students at 826 Valencia still have a newspaper class, where we print an actual newspaper, and we do magazine classes and anthologies where they’re all printed on paper. That’s the main way we get them motivated, that they know it’s going to be in print. It’s much harder for us to motivate the students when they think it’s only going to be on the Web.

  “The vast majority of students we work with read newspapers and books, more so than I did at their age. And I don’t see that dropping off. If anything the lack of faith comes from people our age, where we just assume that it’s dead or dying. I think we’ve given up a little too soon.”

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Image by Erik Charlton, licensed under Creative Commons.

The facts surrounding Guantanamo Bay detentions are quickly slipping down the memory hole. “A protective order that governs Guantánamo records leaves room for the government to destroy documents, including lawyers' notes,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “or put them off-limits in the name of national security.”

A few dedicated archivists are fighting to make sure the Guantanamo Bay records aren’t lost forever, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. The team is collecting as much source material as possible for a collection that will be held at Seaton Hall, New York University, and using the Web At Risk digital archiving project. Archivists have begun by focusing on first-person accounts from defense lawyers, which will soon be published in a book called The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law (New York University Press).

“We know, at the time it's happening, that Guantánamo has potential for iconic and historical significance, and the truth of Guantánamo is going to be a matter of great importance," says law professor Mark Denbeaux, who heads the program. "It's been my experience that the battle to redefine these sorts of events can be lost if one side is more organized and eager to present its point of view." He adds, “It’s not a political exercise, it’s an educational exercise, and a historical one.”

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

In the latest issue of Meatpaper, Chris Ying deconstructs our love for watching men masticate curious things on television. His equation—dubbed the "unattractive men/unattractive meat narrative" or "UM/UM"—is this: “the weirder-looking you are, the weirder the food you have to eat.” He writes, rather scathingly, that UM/UM explains why “an acid-washed porcupine” like Guy Fieri is forced to scarf the slickest, homeliest burgers in the country (though he seems to dig it), while bitsy Giada De Laurentiis tucks away much tidier pieces of chicken and the occasional mini meatball. After grappling briefly with the consequences of his media equation, Ying has these final words:

In all honesty, we can’t really blame television for overfishing, or for lousy, overpriced renditions of street food in upscale restaurants. Nor can we blame TV for aspiring housewives lusting after organic home gardens and Hamptons beach houses. It’d be like blaming porn for teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. It’s all just entertainment. And at the end of the day, food television, like porn, is irrevocably and essentially unsatisfying. They keep turning us on, but we keep watching, mouths watering and agape in horror.

Source: Meatpaper

Image by sashafatcat, licensed under Creative Commons.

Singapore-based ad agency Ogilvy & Mather has completed a series of ads for Matchbox called Young Warriors. It’s a rather frightful experiment with illusion. Young, white boys no older than 5 years old pose with some of the most lethal killing machines now in play in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is militarism at its worst: children piloting machines that kill children and their families (oh yes, and terrorists). Sure, kids play soldier all the time, but they are engaging in imaginative play, not warrior fetishes.

The campaign is crass enough on its own, but a tour of Ogilvy & Mather’s website adds a new layer of revulsion, namely their advice on advertising in a wrecked economy:

The key to success will be understanding the new shopper, brand and retailer. Find out how to create ‘win-win’ shopper marketing solutions and how to turn shoppers into buyers in this recession.

 Here’s more of that “win-win” vision made manifest:

(Thanks, Creative Review)

When the BBC published its series of interviews with Gaza residents talking about Hamas, they pushed the most compelling conversation (and the only comments by a woman) to the bottom of the page. It’s a conversation with Tihani Abed Rabbu. Her teenage son Mustafa, her brother and her closest friend were killed during Israel's January assault, codenamed "Operation Cast Lead."

Journalist and Middle East analyst Helena Cobban took issue with the placement of Abed Rabbu’s story. On her blog, Just World News, she protests the placement of this woman’s story:

Too frequently decision makers in the [mainstream media] simply marginalize women's experiences. But women's work in holding families together in very tough times lies at the heart of the social resiliency that can either save or break a community that's in conflict. So it is not only a compelling 'human interest' story—it is also at the heart of the big 'political' story regarding whether, for example, the people of Gaza or South Lebanon end up bowing to Israel's very lethally pursued political demands, or not. Maybe the BBC could, at the very least, elevate Ms. Abed-Rabbu's story to the top of that page?

Here’s a profoundly unsettling excerpt from the interview with Abed-Rabbu:

"I'm afraid that after I have lost Mostafa, that I will lose somebody else as well. When my children go to sleep, and I look at them, I start to think 'who is next—is it Ahmad's turn, or his brother?'

"What worries me is the safety of my family, my sons and my husband. My husband is going through a difficult time, a crazy time. He wants to affiliate with Hamas, he wants to get revenge after what they have done to us.

"How do you expect us to be peaceful after they have killed my son and turned my family into angry people—as they refer to us, "terrorists". I cannot calm my family down.

Sources: BBC, Just World News 

Image by  Amir Farshad Ebrahimi , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

For less than the price of a cup of coffee per day, you can feed and clothe a newspaper professional. Even if they don’t want a newspaper, this video from Slate V encourages people to “buy one anyway.” That way, hungry and desperate copy editors can survive for at least a few more days.

For an extra layer of humor, read the call for unpaid interns that sits directly below the video on the Slate website.

Source:  Slate V  

You've surely encountered Dwell magazine in your travels. It's the oversized architecture and design magazine exploding with beautiful homes and objects for the fairly well heeled. We couldn’t help but have a giggle when Metropolis (an architecture and design magazine for the really well heeled) took a stab at Dwell in their blogs. Here’s their Open Letter to Dwell Magazine:

Dear Dwell:

Love the magazine. As a favor, I have rewritten the Table of Contents of your July/August issue:

Cover        House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 43    House with Vertical Wood Slats
Page 52    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 58    Ice Cream Makers
Page 66    Pavilion with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 70    Philadelphia
Page 80    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 88    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 96    House with Vertical Wood Slats

I hope you find this useful.

Fondly,

Jeff Speck, AICP
Washington, DC

Putting aside the vertical and horizontal slats appearing on the Metropolis homepage, it's a fair observation and a good ribbing. And not surprisingly, commenters used the opportunity to do a little ribbing of their own:

Gary @ 6:30 am: "At least the slats *are* a reason to read Dwell. No-one reads Metropolis

Herbert @ 10:37 am: "Well, at least Dwell sends me my magazine. And yes I subscribe to both."

I believe the man they called Jesus had words for dust-ups like this one: "First take the vertical wood slat out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." Oh snap!

Source: Metropolis 

Beautiful young women with fashionable clothing and loose headscarves dominated much of the imagery that emerged from the recent Iranian protests. Writing for Women News Network, Latoya Peterson writes that the focus on fashion and beauty may distract people from the real issues at play in Iran.

“Often times, Western feminists become infatuated with the symbolic nature of veiling,” according to Peterson, “and fail to listen to women discussing what they are actually fighting for.” The photographs of women in modern, Western-style clothing with hair cascading out of their veils fit nicely into people’s preconceived notions of modern pro-democracy forces rebelling against the oppressive regime.

In fact, the disastrous economic conditions in Iran are likely what motivated the protests, rather than the politics of beauty and clothing. Emphasizing beautiful protesters could distract people and oversimplify the message of the protests.

The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, on the other hand, may have appreciated some of the problematic attention, Alexander Cockburn wrote for the Nation. According to Cockburn, “Unlike those attractive Iranians, Tamils tend to be small and dark and not beautiful in the contour of poor Neda, who got out of her car at the wrong time in the wrong place, died in view of a cellphone and is now reborn on CNN as the Angel of Iran.” Peterson admits, “Sex sells but so does Iranian beauty, compelling even those who are disinterested in politics and current events to pay attention.”

Sources:  Women News Network ,  The Nation  

Image by Hamed Saber, licensed under Creative Commons.

The pilot issue of the literary journal The New Anonymous has hit newsstands with one very striking variation from its neighbors: the entire production of the magazine, including the articles printed, is anonymous. The nameless editors screen and edit submissions anonymously, simply, as the publication’s website notes, “celebrating the text.”

Writing for BOMB magazine Brian McMullen calls the journal “an inspiring, new embodiment of democracy at its best.”  He also applauds the “15 good stories and poems,” while questioning if the “nine inexplicable pages of zany fake ads” help the journal. 

You can order a copy of The New Anonymous on their website.

Sources: The New Anonymous, BOMB

  “ Running from Gas ,” a Pakistani lawyer runs from tear gas, Pakistan. © Emilio Morenatti.

Pictures of the Year International (POYi), among the oldest photojournalism competitions in the world, opens its 2009 exhibit this weekend at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. If you don’t live on the West Coast, though, don’t let that stop you: POYi allows website users to browse the award-winning photojournalism in its online winner’s gallery.

There’s something to delight everyone there, all of it beautiful. Many images have a humanitarian bent, such as Jakob Carlsen’s “Untouchables of Asia,” the winner of the World Understanding award, but there’s no limit the scope of the competition. There is spectacular sports photojournalism, the best of the 2008 presidential campaign, riveting portraiture, and the list goes on.

This is POYi’s 66^th year. It is a program of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, which previously served as host to the exhibitions.

Despite Al-Jazeera’s international reputation for serious investigative reporting, the company's English-language station has yet to find a cable provider in either the U.S. or Canada. 

The Canadian magazine This comments that “Canada can no longer afford to shun the world’s first truly global news network—especially one that is both steered and shaped by Canada’s best and brightest.”  Al-Jazeera English is, after all, broadcast in more than 140 million households and in at least 100 countries. Why is North America so far behind?

Al-Jazeera isn’t giving up easily. “The network’s inability to secure cable providers in the U.S., and the highly politicized battles to undermine its effort for access across the continent, have left it embattled but not defeated.”

Only in Toledo, Ohio and Burlington, VT has Al-Jazeera English found a home with a cable provider, although not without opposition. When viewers in Burlington complained that the station is anti-American and anti-Semitic, town hall debates raged and Al-Jazeera was taken off the air.  Recognizing that the station offers “alternative” perspectives, the city council eventually reinstated the channel. 

In the United States you can catch up on Al-Jazeera's website or on Link TV.

Source: This (article not available online)

Image by Joi, licensed under Creative Commons.

For those of you who bemoan the slow demise of investigative journalism as we have known it, dry your eyes. Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine has seen journalism’s future, and it is public relations. You’ll want to get right to fighting over this, so I’ll cut straight to Cavanaugh’s vision:

Are flacks the future, or even the present, of investigative journalism? This interpretation makes intuitive sense. Important data points by which we continue to live our live—the number of jobs that were created or destroyed by NAFTA, the villainy of the Serbs in the Yugoslav breakup, all sorts of projected benefits or disasters in President Obama’s budget plans—are largely the inventions of P.R. workers.

And though it’s considered wise to believe the contrary, these communications types are not constructing all these news items entirely (or even mostly) by lying. Flackery requires putting together credible narratives from pools of verifiable data. This activity is not categorically different from journalism. Nor is the teaching value that flackery provides entirely different from that of journalism: Most of the content you hear senators and congressmen reading on C-SPAN is stuff flacks provided to staffers.

…the idea of public relations (and its many fancy permutations, from “image management” to “oppo research” to “crisis”) replacing objective journalism becomes less scary when you reflect that … frequently the most valuable information comes out just because somebody wants to make somebody else look bad.

Source: Reason 

If you read just one thing about Michael Jackson in the wake of his untimely death, make it this beautiful rumination by Utne visionary Adrienne Maree Brown. “Michael Jackson, who’s loving you?” is a lovely personal remembrance, and a gentle reminder of the role we all played in his fall from grace. Here's an excerpt:

When the rumors and the truth were all too prevalent (the children, both his and others), and he wasn’t getting the psychological support and accountability he needed, we turned from him and derided him. We made the distinction of loving the child, but ridiculing the man.

How many times did his heart break before this? How many times did he experience happiness, community, belonging and love in his life, in his off-the-stage life?

My entire life is framed by his songs. I have had ecstatic moments to his music while high, while drunk, while sober, while sad, while in love, while in heartbreak. It seems silly to feel this way over a pop singer, and yet it's crucial to feel this way over an artist who reshaped how we understand music, movement and communication. He was at every good party I ever attended (which is where I have felt more release and unity with other people than just about anywhere else).

I suspect he always will be.

(Thanks, Feministing.)

Image by stylespion, licensed under Creative Commons.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon has spent a decade explaining why he writes such strong female characters for his projects (Buffy, Firefly, Dollhouse, the film Serenity)—and in the clip below, he gives a powerful, awesome (and hopefully final) answer to the question that reporters just love to ask him.

If you’re at all interested in women in the media, you must watch this clip, which is from a speech he gave at a 2006 Equality Now event (re-posted recently at the Contexts blog). The best bit is at the very end—I won’t spoil it for you. Whedon begins speaking at the two-minute mark, after a nice introduction by Meryl Streep. (Transcript is available here.)

(Thanks, Bitch.)

Barry Katz, writing for the summer 2009 issue of Arcade, sees the economic downturn as a much needed kick in the teeth for the design world, especially in advertising. He writes:

All this means fewer products, fewer resources expended on making things and fewer designers engaged in conceiving and planning them. Fewer products to sell means fewer advertisements, which means less paper and more trees, less air time and more air. Suddenly there is less chemical pollution of the biosphere and less visual pollution of the semiosphere. People feel less assaulted by the relentless barrage of things and images and become more attentive to the spaces between them, which they will begin to call “nature.”

Katz suggests a new breed of unemployed designers will actually design more, introducing the concept of “un-design,” a process that, among many other restorative acts, includes dismantling cigarette machines and neutralizing corporate identities. Sounds like a good start…

Source: Arcade 

Will the death of journalism mean the end of democracy?  The newest issue of Mother Jones provides us with a rundown of depressing statistics about the state of media:

- 43% of Americans say it would hurt civil life “a lot” if their local newspapers closed.  Yet when asked if they’d miss their paper, 42% say “not much” or “not at all.”

- By one estimate, an entirely Web-based New York Times could generate only enough money to support about 20% of the paper’s current staff.

- The editor of the New York Times Magazine says a typical cover story costs more than $40,000 to produce—and that excludes editing, art, and fact-checking. That’s more than Mother Jones’ story budget for freelance writers for an entire issue.

- The top 10% of bloggers earn an average of $19,000 a year.  For all bloggers, the median is $200 for men, $100 for women.

Source: Mother Jones (article not yet available online)

The great migration from print to digital has indelibly changed the written word and the people who create it. “It's not journalism we're losing, any more than it was agriculture or steel,” former newspaper editor Bob Sheasley writes in the new issue of Lost.

The online magazine’s new issue, Lost in Print, explores what is slipping away as writers stumble toward digital. “Writers are adapting to new platforms and quieter newsrooms, but writers are writers — out there in the world, taking it all in, putting it into words for us to read,” the editors note reads. “On that front, nothing's changing.”

Visiting the broken-down steel towns or the once-vibrant newsrooms, Sheasley expresses a different sentiment. Journalism and steel haven’t gone away, but there’s no doubt that something has been lost.

Source: Lost 

Image by  Adam Tinworth , licensed under  Creative Commons .

PolitiFact.com has made a name for itself by fact-checking politicians’ statements and promises, an extremely valuable service that earned the site a 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Now, the St. Petersburg Times reports, the site is taking on the truth-distorting pundits of TV and talk radio—and not just the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O’Reillys of the world; the site has also fact-checked statements made by lefty pundits Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

PolitiFact.com, which is a project of the St. Petersburg Times, rates the veracity of claims on its Truth-O-Meter—for example, Joe Scarborough’s recent statement that “President Obama has never received a paycheck from a profitmaking business in his entire life” landed firmly on the “false” end of the spectrum—and lists the arguments and sources involved in the researchers’ conclusions. 

The best part? Editors and reporters at the St. Petersburg Times do all this work so that you don’t have to. Just suggest a statement to check, and they’ll consider putting it to the Truth-O-Meter’s test.

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Sources: PolitiFact.com, St. Petersburg Times

Image by futureatlas.com, licensed under Creative Commons.

The formerly sacrosanct separation between editorial and advertising is slowly crumbling as the bottom drops out of media budgets. What was once referred to as a wall is now more like a fence, Natalie Pompilio reports for the American Journalism Review. And that fence has a front door, and some holes in it.

“While many experts agree the beleaguered news industry has to change its ways in order to survive,” Pompilio writes, “the question is how to do so while maintaining credibility and standards.”

Source: American Journalism Review 

Making fun of magazine covers is like netting fish in a barrel, but that doesn't mean it's not funny. In a stunt aimed at catering specifically to its core readership of cranky libertarians—who still inexplicably doubt the existence of climate change and, if they didn't like pot so much and God so little, would look a lot like, well...conservatives—Reason magazine went through a stack of Time magazines to showcase the Top 10 Most Absurd Covers of the Past 40 Years. 

Highlights include a black-and-red line drawing of Satan ("The Occult Revival: Satan Returns"), a little boy sporting a crocodile tear ("Crack Kids: Their Mothers used drugs, and now it's the children who suffer"), and a ghostly, wide-eyed little boy who, sitting in front of a keyboard, seems to be possessed by demons ("Cyberporn: Can we protect our kids—and free speech?").

The write-ups following each cover image, packed with data and designed to take the air out of Time's perpetually hyperbolic balloon, are quick-witted and, not suprisingly I suppose, well-Reason-ed. That said, one can't help but notice that the same critics who are up-in-arms over this fear-mongering and tabloid imagery are the same people who champion wild west capitalism. And the strategies Time uses to sell these covers are not only timeless and textbook, they're proven to win. So, the item leaves me wondering what's more important: Responsible headlines and reasoned journalism or big sales.

Source: Reason

Journalism in Colombia can be a dangerous job. Hollman Morris and Juan Pablo Morris, the Colombian journalists behind the controversial investigative television show Contravía, know that better than most. The brothers speak of “denouncing” in broad terms, calling attention to the violence propagated by both the left-wing FARC guerillas and the right-wing paramilitaries that has plagued the country. These denouncements are a dangerous business, attracting death threats and political harassment toward the journalists. 

There are fewer kidnappings in Colombia these days, but it’s important to continue exposing the human rights violations throughout the country, Hollman Morris told the Center for Investigative Reporting (video below). According to Morris, these investigations into atrocities “will become the history that nourishes the memories of the next generations of Colombians,” and stops the country’s tragic history of violence from repeating itself.

(Thanks, CJR.)

Source: Center for Investigative Reporting 

Reports coming out of Iran from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and various blogs are giving foreigners an unprecedented view into the ongoing political crisis in the country. The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, blogging from “a pier in Cape Cod,” has emerged as one of the major arbiters of information on the Iranian protests. Twitter and Facebook users are turning their profiles green in support of the protesters. The same technologies are giving idealists around the world the chance to engage in the crisis, both symbolically and actively. But just because people can engage, doesn’t mean they always should.

The raw, unedited nature of much of the information coming out of Iran could give every the impression that they know what’s really going on inside the country. The abject failure of cable news networks to cover the events reinforces that idea. Editor and Publisher recently admitted, “Web reports from Iranians, including Twitter feeds, have outflanked much of print and certainly cable TV.” With foreign reporters getting kicked out of the country, the reliance on social media for news will likely continue to grow.

As influential as social networking tools are in publicizing Iran’s conflict, much of that information has been unreliable. It was widely reported that opposition leader Mousavi was placed under house arrest, which was just one of many rumors that circulated and later turned out to be untrue. The best reporting, according to Kevin Drum writing for Mother Jones, may be coming from the BBC and the New York Times, and other mainstream, traditional outlets.

News from Iran has also made people “desperate to do something to show solidarity,” according to tech guru Clay Shirky in an interview with TED. Shirky said, “Reading personal messages from individuals on the ground prompts a whole other sense of involvement.” This has led people to help out the protesters, according to Shirky, by offering secure web proxies to help them mask their online identities. That sense of involvement, however, has the potential to lead people astray.

Some foreigners have been moved to launch web-based attacks against the Iranian state-run media, overwhelm the state’s servers with a constant stream of requests. Tech-President advocated this “bit of cyber aggression aimed at the Iranian government” as a way to channel the considerable energies of observers outside Iran. The process is so easy that I accidentally helped launch one of these attacks by clicking on an errant link while researching this blog post.

The motivation behind the web-attacks is understandable, but they may end up doing more harm than good. Evgeny Morozov, writing for Foreign Policy, points out that these attacks from other countries actually strengthen the Iranian government’s argument that “foreign intervention” is the driving force behind the protests. And if the attacks get bad enough, there’s a chance that the government could simply pull the plug on the highly centralized internet throughout the country, cutting off the Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube videos that feed the foreign knowledge of the protests.

Sources: The Atlantic, Editor and Publisher, Mother Jones, TED, Tech-President, Foreign Policy

Image by  Hamed Saber , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Tired of all the confusion over the big digital conversion? The funny folks at McSweeney’s have just what you need: “Easy Instructions for the Conversion to Digital TV.” Here’s a choice excerpt:

First, if you already have cable, you don't have to do anything—just keep paying your monthly subscription-fee plus premium-channel packages, surcharges for additional converter boxes and remote controls, FCC and OVS fees, OMG and LOL charges, the Stamp Act, parental-control monitoring, additional cost to meta-monitor the parental-control monitors, and the thirty-seven other expenses listed conveniently in the fine print of your bill in Section 46.2, Schedule C, reverse side.

(Thanks, Columbia Journalism Review. )

Source: McSweeney’s 

Image by gbaku, licensed under Creative Commons.

“Can we please stop talking about feminism as if it is mothers and daughters fighting about clothes?” Katha Pollitt writes in The Nation. “Second wave: you’re going out in that? Third wave: just drink your herbal tea and leave me alone!”

The wave structure tossed around in the media “looks historical,” Pollitt writes, when in reality it’s anything but. Second wavers (like Adrienne Rich and Gloria Steinem) are in their golden years; third wavers (known for staking a renewed claim on “girl culture” and their passion for the intersection of race, class, and gender) are approaching 40.

Yet third wave “continues to be used to describe each latest crop of feminists—loosely defined as any female with more political awareness than a Bratz doll—and to portray them in terms of their rejection of second wavers, who are supposedly starchy and censorious. Like moms. Somebody’s mom, anyway,” Pollitt writes.

Aside from being inaccurate, this wave narrative reduces feminism into a tired battle between sexual freedom and repression. “Why not acknowledge that there will never be a bright line between pleasure and danger, personal choice and social responsibility, open-minded and judgment?” Pollitt writes. “The fine points of sexual freedom will all be there waiting for us—after we get childcare, equal pay, retirement security, universal access to birth control and abortion, healthcare for all and men who do their share at home, after we achieve equal representation in government, are safe from sexual violence, and raise a generation of girls who don’t hate their bodies.”

Source: The Nation

Yesterday we wrote of Chinese police blocking television cameras with umbrellas at Tiananmen Square. Here's what that hilarious and infuriating low-tech censorship looked like (cheers to the BBC correspondent, who played this one like a pro):

Source: BBC 

It’s tough to find intelligent and educational videos among the teeming masses of cat movies and puppy cams that clutter the web. Open Culture continually trolls the internet for the internet’s smartest sites and resources. This week, they posted a list of the 40 best cultural and educational video sites around. The list includes a few sites that have been profiled in Utne Reader (Europa Film Treasures and LinkTV) and a bunch I’d never heard of before.

Source: Open Culture

Throughout the Bush years, the American Conservative was one of the few voices on the right that consistently stood up to the war-mongering neocon rule. Founded by Pat Buchanan, the magazine is consistently thought provoking (sometimes maddening), and garnered a nomination for best political coverage in the 2009 Utne Independent Press Awards.

Last month, the magazine nearly folded. Writing for Campus Progress, Daniel Strauss profiled the American Conservative and its efforts to stay independent from the right and the left. The magazine now operates as a nonprofit, and has recently published articles by both left wing blogger Matthew Yglesias and right-wing blogger Steve Sailer. I may not always agree with the magazine, but it’s good to know they’ll be around for a while.

Sources: The American Conservative, Campus Progress 

The International Society for Human Rights has collaborated with the German ad agency Ogilvy and Mather to create a compelling collection of posters depicting the threat of cyber dissent to regimes with a less-than-friendly disposition towards free expression. Thanks to Max Klingberg for permission to publish these images.

(Thanks,  Eager Eyes .) 

“Thomas, don't you even know how to be a real Indian? How many times have you seen Dances with Wolves, anyways? 100, 200 times? Oh Jesus, Thomas, you have seen it that many times.”
—Victor Joseph to Thomas-Builds-the-Fire

In the groundbreaking 1998 film Smoke Signals, penned by Sherman Alexie, Victor chastises his friend Thomas for his politically-incorrect obsession. In the May-June issue of Colorlines, cultural critic Paul Chaat Smith examines why American Indians are so preoccupied with Hollywood movies.

“We follow casting, production, shooting schedules of each new Hollywood feature about us with the anxiousness of European investors,” he writes. “We debate the merits of each new Indian film with passion and at great length...We critique plot, clothes, hair, history, horses, horse riding, language and makeup.”

According to Smith, Indians are obsessed with Hollywood because Hollywood images have defined how the broader culture understands them. Still, he argues that Indians would do well to remember that movies are still entertainment, not the sole vehicle for representation. He points out that some Native newspapers defended the 1992 film Dances With Wolves against white critics, presumably because of its positive imagery.

“That shows how confused many of us are,” Smith writes, “that we would act as unpaid press agents for a film that is based on a novel and screenplay about Comanches, and then shifted to South Dakota only after the production designer—and this is kind of poignant—finds a shortage of buffalo in Oklahoma. And not a single Comanche or Kiowa character, some based on actual historical figures, is changed. I mean, yo, Kevin, Mike: saying Ten Bears is Sioux is like saying Winston Churchill is Albanian.”
Smith makes a case for Indian filmmakers to write, produce, and direct their own films, but to do so as part of a serious investigation of their history. This includes questioning where and from whom they get information about what it means to be Indian.

Source: Colorlines

Journalists are burying their heads in the sand, as newspapers spin their wheels in the dune, not realizing that the axles are already broken.

No wait.

Journalists are choking in a sea of turbulent media, struggling and gasping for air, as newspapers—that look less and less like lifeboats—navigate perilously close to a rocky shore.

One more try:

The ivory castle of journalism is being raided by a marauding hoard of bloggers and citizen journalists who are hell-bent on scorching the earth of the media, and then salting it so nothing will ever grow again.

Writers have come up with plenty of metaphors to describe the death of their own industry and, like the over-crowded media landscape they lament, there’s plenty of quantity just not a lot of quality. Beth Macy, writing for the American Journalism Review included some old saws and a couple of new ones in a recent article on journalists who have decided: “If the ship's sinking, she's going down with it.”

Here are a few:

"Some days you feel like you're slowly being buried up to your neck, but you're still there, still breathing."

"We're the ones left in the lifeboat. We made it off the ship, and we're out in the big ocean. But we're alive, and we're together, and one way or another, we are going to get to shore."

“It's not just about Budweiser any more. There are lots of microbreweries and, while the microbreweries might not pay as well, sometimes they are more rewarding."

"Just like with the economy, I think it's going to get worse, and then eventually something beautiful is going to grow up from the ashes."

And my favorite:

"I feel like I live in Middle Earth, and the dark cloud has covered the land.”

Image by Katherine Oneill,  licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: American Journalism Review 

Hypotheticals are flying about judge Sonya Sotomayor, Barack Obama’s recent nomination for Supreme Court Justice. Media Matters wonders, what if she were a man? Would newspapers still question her “temperament”? Eric Boehlert wonders, “Would the NYT ever dream of typing up a straight news article about whether the judge was too bossy on the bench?” He thinks not.

The American Spectator questions: “What if Sotomayor were white?” Writer Andrew Cline postulates that more than half of the praise for Sotomayor stems from her race, gender, and socioeconomic background. “Most of the praise of Sotomayor is being dished out by commentators who seem ignorant of her record,” Cline writes, “but acutely aware that she is a Hispanic woman who grew up in a housing project.”

In the same vein, conservative radio host Bill Bennett recently went beyond speculation and straight into unfounded rumors, according to a transcript provided by Think Progress. Speaking with Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, Bennett said:

BENNETT: Did [Sotomayor] get into Princeton on affirmative action, one wonders.

BARNES: One wonders.

BENNETT: Summa Cum Laude, I don’t think you get on affirmative action. I don’t know what her major was, but Summa Cum Laude’s a pretty big deal.

BARNES: I guess it is, but you know, there’s some schools and maybe Princeton’s not one of them, where if you don’t get Summa Cum Laude then or some kind of Cum Laude, you then, you’re a D+ student.

In response, Salon.com threw out a hypothetical of their own, saying “if Sotomayor were a white man nominated by a Republican, he and Bennett would never have had that conversation.”

Source:  Media Matters ,  American Spectator ,  Think Progress ,  Salon.com  

There’s one thing about this whole death of newspapers thing that troubles me: where do you go to mourn? Answer: Toronto, where you’ll find this:

Or you can make your own dead newspaper memorial.

(Thanks, Make.)

Source: Blade Diary

Image by  Blade Diary

File this under odd: PBS has filed a complaint with the California Attorney General’s office against a young San Diego gentleman who intends to announce himself this weekend as the “successor” to the late Fred Rogers.

Eighteen-year-old Michael Kinsell told Current, a newspaper about public TV and radio, that he already has filmed six episodes of Michael’s Enchanted Neighborhood. He intends to make the public announcement this Sunday, when, not inconveniently, his nonprofit is holding a gala ceremony to honor Fred Rogers as the recipient of its new Children’s Hero Award. According to the PBS complaint, the talent agent who booked celebrities for the event was “repeatedly assured by Kinsell that it is a PBS-sanctioned event.” One can only presume that Kinsell intends to load guests onto tiny trolleys and scoot them along to the land of Make-Believe.

Source: Current

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Image by randomduck, licensed under Creative Commons.

How would you fill an empty lot? That’s what the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts is asking. Their flickr site provides a template photo of an empty urban lot and invites people to fill it in with their own ideas. The resulting collection of images ranges from the environmentally practical to the downright whimsical, including this waterfall and a tightrope walker, all nested between two buildings. Governing reports that the project was intended to spark conversation about public spaces rather than actual plans for development. That’s probably good news, because in these tough economic times, who wants to fund a giant fish tank with car-sized fish?

Source: Governing

Image courtesy of John Ruppert

Craigslist recently announced that it was getting rid of its “erotic” services section. Instead, the website will have an “adult” services section with more stringent screening and a $10 fee. Speaking with On the Media, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said to Craigslist, “you've got to recognize that your site has become the number one Internet brothel, and you have to take some responsibility for this.” The CEO of Craigslist countered, accusing politicians of “a bit of a witch hunt or a use of Craigslist as a political piñata.”

Largely absent from this conversation are the sex workers who have come to rely on Criagslist for their livelihoods. The latest issue of $pread, a magazine about “illuminating the sex industry,” has a point-counterpoint with two sex workers on the effect of the new Craigslist rules.

It’s understandable that Craigslist would bow to pressure from politicians and special interest groups, according to a writer known as Starchild, but that doesn’t make it fair. “Their new policy singles out folks who seek and provide erotic services from all other Craigslist users and subjects them to special discrimination, not to mention a greater risk of arrest, fine, and jail,” because of the ability to trace the fees. She does not, however, blame Craigslist. And she doesn’t advocate that people leave the site. Having the “erotic” services listed along side job and apartment listings on Craigslist, she writes, “can do nothing but help sex work be seen as normal and acceptable.”

The new rules aren’t unfair to sex workers, according to Mistress Matisse, but they are unfortunate. If sex workers don’t want to put down a credit card for the Craigslist ads, they can always go other places. And people who can’t afford the fee have bigger problems than Craigslist.

“Don’t blame Craigslist,” Starchild writes. “At least, not too much. Instead, let’s lobby them to send those $10 payments, which Craigslist says will go to charity, to groups like the Desiree Alliance, Sex Workers Outreach Project, and Erotic Service Providers Union, which are working to decriminalize prostitution.”

Sources: On the Media, $pread (article not available online)

In the quest to save journalism, media experts have wandered into a mythical land of elves, orks, and gaming nerds: World of Warcraft. “Ninety-seven percent of American teens—the future audience of the press—are gamers,” Joe Yachimec writes for the Ryerson Review of Journalism (though he provides no source for the statistic). Gamers are being neglected by the mainstream press and treated like “adolescent, prurient drivel,” according to video game researcher Ian Bogost. The people who do write about games are often too inside the gaming world, and lack the journalistic knowledge to appeal to a mass audience. Paying more attention to games and gamers might not save journalism, Yachimec writes, “there’s only so much you can expect from a shopping magazine,” but it could provide an extra few million readers.

Source: Ryerson Review of Journalism (article not available online)

You know the adage: Sex sells. The wizards who cooked up the low-cal, chocolaty Mars Fling, however, seem to have taken the maxim a bit too, um, literally. In a Bitch-at-its-best take down, the feminist magazine wryly dissects a marketing campaign that urges women to “pleasure [themselves] with this chocolate sensation time and time again.”

Source: Bitch

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, representations of human forms were banned—with one exception: men could sit for passport photos (women were represented in their travel documents by fingerprints only).

Young Taliban men flocked to Kabul’s photo studios—but not for passport photos. Instead they brushed their long hair, applied makeup to the flesh around their eyes, and posed affectionately with friends and sometimes guns.

Just weeks after the Taliban were driven from Kabul in 2001, photographer Thomas Dworzak wandered into a photo studio near his hotel and discovered piles of these photographs. As he scooped them up and paid for them, shop owners looked at him like “some stupid Westerner.”

He’s assembled the photographs in a book. His photo agency, the legendary Magnum Photos, has produced a short video and slideshow with commentary by Ahmed Rashid, a veteran correspondent in the region.

Rashid points out two things in an attempt to explain the photos, chief among them: Afghans love to have their picture taken.

He also speaks of a “very strong homosexual tradition” in Afghanistan, “in which an older man will kind of adopt a young man and become a lover and teach him whatever skills he may have.”

Though Taliban leader Mullah Omar banned homosexuality, Rashid explains, this tradition, particularly in Southern Afghanistan, “continued, but it was done surreptitiously.”

Dworzak’s found photographs are captivating evidence of a piece of Afghanistan’s history buried by the daily drumbeat of new violence.

(Thanks, Coudal.)

The new Star Trek has unleashed a slew of inaccuracies about the franchise in newspapers across the country, and detail-oriented devotees aren’t letting them get away with it. Craig Silverman, editor of the fantastic newspaper-correction-spotter RegretTheError.com, tracks a series of Star Trek–related flubs—and subsequent corrections issued by editors bombarded with letters from Trekkies—in his most recent column for the Columbia Journalism Review:

The superfans deserve credit for being so diligent and outspoken. They seek out mistakes contained in the far reaches of every newspaper and set their emails to stun. And they’re on the hunt at all times…

Source: Columbia Journalism Review

Image by alfredituzz :B, licensed under Creative Commons. 

In newspapers, if it bleeds, it leads. Thai newspapers take that axiom to an extreme, putting gory photos of death and human misery on front pages nearly every day. According to Global Post’s Patrick Winn, a recent newspaper front page featured, “a meth dealer splayed dead beside a toilet, a married couple shot dead and slumped in their pick-up truck—and for comic relief, photos exposing a con artist who donned flight uniforms to deceive shopkeepers and women.”

This constant barrage of violent images may be corrupting young children, needlessly shaming victims, and violating good taste, according to many in the country. Winn reports that a group of academics have started a campaign urging restraint.

The problem faced by these academics is that the violent newspaper industry in Thailand continues to thrive, unlike the newspaper business in the United States. In fact, the violent Thai newspapers continue to do better than their more modest alternatives. Still, the academics continue to be reminded of the importance of their cause nearly every morning. One doctoral student told Global Post, “I don’t like the criminal pictures. To have breakfast in the morning and see that? Ugh.”

Image by  Colin and Sarah , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: Global Post 

If you believe her most fervent critics, Palestinian journalist Taghreed El-Khodary's primary professional accomplishment is "vomiting Israeli propaganda" onto the front-page of the New York Times, her employer since 2001. As a passionate and talented journalist from Gaza employed by an American newspaper often accused of marginalizing or ignoring the issue of Palestinian rights, El-Khodary walks a near-impossible line.  In a piece for Columbia Journalism Review, El-Khodary writes about her struggles to walk that treacherous tightrope during the recent Israeli attack on the people and infrastructure of Gaza:

Israel did not let any international journalists into Gaza, so I feel the weight of responsibility, the need to explain to the world what is happening. And that is one of several kinds of pressure: I want to maintain my credibility, so I work hard not to exclude any element of the story. I deal with Hamas watchers and fighters, which I know how to do. I feel the pressure and possible death from Israeli drones, F16s, helicopters, and tanks.

The piece (only available online to subscribers) is also a catalog of the horrors she witnessed and reported:

I enter a location that has been hit five times by Israeli bombs. I worry that the drones could hit at any moment, but try to focus on the story. I attend a funeral for more than thirty people, and talk to a father while staring into his dead daughter's brown eyes. "From now on," he says, "I'm Hamas."

At the height of the Israeli attacks—which Israel dubbed "Operation Cast Lead"—El-Khodary gave a gripping television interview that makes a fool of any critic who declares her to be anything other than what she most certainly is: a journalist prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to share the tragedy and complexities of the Palestinian story. Here she is:

Source: Columbia Journalism Review 

How much responsibility should be put on the media for hate crimes? Its fair share, according to Extra!, the publication of media watch dogs FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting). In response to a 40 percent increase in hate crimes against Hispanic people, a UCLA professor conducted a study aimed at quantifying hate speech on commercial radio. Chon Noriega found “systematic and extensive use of false facts, flawed argumentation, divisive language, and dehumanizing metaphors . . . directed toward specific, vulnerable groups.” In reaction, the National Hispanic Media Coalition has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the scope and potential human cost of hateful broadcasts.

Source: Extra! 

For those of you concerned about President Obama’s highfalutin spicy-mustard habit, take note: Nixon and Kissinger savored some exotic Mexican food back in their day, as reported by Dan Rather (ca. 1973) on the May 7 episode of The Daily Show.

(Thanks, Columbia Journalism Review.)

Source: The Daily Show 

Testifying before a Senate hearing on the “Future of Media,” David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire and a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, warned that “high end journalism is dying in America, and unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else.”

He begins his comments, broadcast today by Democracy Now, by saying that he doubts that neither newspaper publishers nor new media mavericks will agree with his overall analysis. He blasts the captains of the newspaper industry for having a martyr complex, and delivers a withering analysis of their short-sighted decision to cut newsroom budgets in the hopes the consumers wouldn’t notice—a move he equates with Detroit’s downfall in the Seventies. He also reminds proprietors of news-oriented websites that bloggers, tweeters, and citizen journalists can’t take the place of professional reporters, who, like firefighters and other civic servants, require training and institutional support—not to mention funding for investigations that never see the light of day.

His conclusion is that without an acknowledgement that content is king, there is no hope for the future of serious journalism, for profit or not.

Source: Democracy Now! 

The death of the newspaper is upon us! But let's not concern ourselves with that now. It's humbling to peer backwards into history at the process of producing a newspaper or magazine in the age of typewriters, teletype machines, and glue fumes—which you can almost smell in this set of photographs from the newsroom of The Daily Titan, the paper of California State University circa 1970. Newspaper junkies, you're welcome.

Image by Dan Wybrant.

(Thanks, Creative Review)

When a war correspondent reflects on their time spent reporting in Iraq, it’s usually the same story: a few harrowing stories from a few days or weeks spent riding with a unit in Baghdad or somewhere nearby. When the history of Iraq is evoked at all, it is a history that begins in 2003. Jane Arraf is an exception. In the years leading up to the 2003 invasion she was the only Western reporter stationed in Iraq. She worked for CNN and lived in a hotel on the Tigris. Eventually, she moved into a house. She knows Baghdad like no other Western journalist, which is why her reflection piece in the Christian Science Monitor is a must read.

In My Iraq: a reporter’s 20-year retrospective, Arraf has the good sense to bury the harrowing war correspondent stories—and she has her share—in favor of the stories and voices of the Iraqis she came to know over the years. And quoting a particularly courageous Iraqi journalist who happens to be a woman and a mother, Arraf shares a truth that should be printed on the back of every war reporter's Iraq book: "It takes more courage to be a mother in Iraq than a war correspondent."

Source: Christian Science Monitor

There is no better place to encounter the wide world than a carefully curated rack of magazines for sale.  A newsstand is a holy place. There are fewer of them every year and that makes them holier still. Maybe it’s the illusion of abundance that attracts some of us to newsstands—magazines are shutting down every day, but that’s impossible to believe when you’re staring at hundreds of them.

Maybe that’s why I can’t stop staring at this photograph…

Image by  Tiago Ribeiro , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Before creating The Wire, one of the greatest shows in the history of television, David Simon was a journalist for the Baltimore Sun. In a brief, over-lunch interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab, Simon talks about the future of journalism and how newspapers can charge for content.

Some newspaper experts argue, “We already let the horse out of the barn door,” in giving content away for free, but Simon doesn’t buy that. He brings up the point that “television was free 30 years ago. Now everybody’s paying 16 bucks a month, 17 bucks a month, 70 dollars a month.” The key is getting a core group of writers that can’t be found anywhere else (like the HBO model). Either that, or sell porn.

You can watch the video below:

David Simon on charging for news and whether "The Wire" is journalism from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

(Thanks, Kottke.)

Source: Nieman Journalism Lab

Featured in this week’s episode:

- "Your Ultimate Home Bar Guide" and the fine art of aging coffee (not yet available online), from Imbibe

- "25 Beautiful Girls," from New Moon Girls (not yet available online)

- Women recover from sexual violence during the Rwandan genocide, from Herizons 

 Sources: Imbibe, New Moon Girls, Herizons

In 2006, Google quietly purchased Paper of Records, a digital archive of early newspapers, for its Google News Archive. Shortly after they took over management from the site’s founder Bob Huggins late last year, the archive vanished from the web.

Inside Higher Ed reports on the stir the archive’s disappearance aroused among scholars. While many were upset by the sudden interruption of their research, others raised a more troubling question—what does this incident say about the security and accessibility of resources that are controlled by a large, private company like Google?

Weighing in on the debate, Huggins observes that “there is no other entity on the planet that is Google.” He claims that it will be a hundred years before digitization projects supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and other organizations are useful to scholars. Meanwhile, Google sits alone in its ability to efficiently manage large-scale digitization efforts.

The danger, historian John F. DeFelice comments, is that whoever controls the sources controls history. “They control the paths to access and perhaps even filter which primary sources are available and which are not. Unlike real world archives, digital sources can be manipulated, altered, edited, re-translated, falsified, adulterated, and made to disappear forever at the touch of a key.” While no one is accusing Google of manipulating electronic information in this way, the fact that it is easily within their power to do so unsettles DeFelice enough to ask, “When the originals are recycled, what will be left?”

Video by the delightful and competent  Chuck Olsen  of  MN Stories  and  The Uptake .

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today's guest is zine librarian Alycia Sellie. We asked her for five links and here's what she came up with. 

Zine World:  Zine World is the most well-known print source for reviews and information about zines, and it's web presence is formidable as well with a comprehensive list of links for everything from postal rates, upcoming events and zine news.

Queer Zine Archive Project: QZAP is a free digital zine archive that strives to "preserve queer zines and make them available to other queers, researchers, historians, punks, and anyone else who has an interest DIY publishing and underground queer communities." This site is beautifully designed, perpetually growing with new titles, extremely inspiring, and an amazing historical record.

Zine Wiki: The amazing thing about Zine Wiki is that the phlethora of information about zines already there is just a start; the fantastic thing is that anyone can add and edit (meta)data about their zine, or add themselves to the extensive list of zinesters!

We Make Zines Ning: For more meta and social networking (when your stapling arm gets too tired), the We Make Zines Ning is a place (that isn't those other sites that we all know too well) to promote your zine, find out about zine events and even friend your local zine librarian.

Nobody Cares about your Stupid Zine Podcast: Here's a new zine project for your ears, ipods and RSS readers: Alex Wrekk (of Stolen Sharpie Revolution) and Mark Parker (Independent Publishing Resource Center librarian and creator of zinethug.com) team together to interview zinesters far and wide, and I am looking forward to the next installment!

Bio: Alycia Sellie is an academic art librarian living in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. After participating in the first ever Zine Librarians (un)Conference in Seattle, Washington, she is busy planning the NYC Zine Fest to be held at the Brooklyn Lyceum in June 2009, and can be reached at http://alycia.brokenja.ws/.

Previous Alt Wire Guests:   Davy Rothbart, Roger White, Dan Sinker, Phil Yu, Matt Novak,  Jason Marsh, David LaBounty, Jen Angel, Will Braun, Regan Hofmann, Josh Breitbart, Andrew Lam,  Jessica Valenti, Jessica Hoffmann, Noah Scalin, Rinku Sen, Paddy Johnson, Melissa Mcewan,  Fatemeh Fakhraie , Joe Biel, Anne Elizabeth Moore 

In the May issue of The Walrus, Don Gillmor explores the continuing rise of the world’s thriving (or is it throbbing?) center of romance: Harlequin Enterprises, which has shipped more than five and a half billion bodice-rippers during its 60-year tenure.

The piece is a great read, filled with lots of interesting analysis and history—in the 1970s, a new president zeroed in on the romance-novel audience and went to hilarious lengths to get Harlequin novels into women’s hands—and, ultimately, it seems that the company has succeeded because of its adherence to its own tried-and-true formula. Gillmor describes “editorial guidelines for each series that lay out the theme, the profiles of the hero and heroine, the acceptable amount of sex, and the number of words.”

The specs for the Desire series describe the hero as powerful and wealthy, “an alpha male with a sense of arrogance and entitlement. While he may be harsh and direct, he is never physically cruel.” The heroine, on the other hand, is “complex and flawed. She is strong-willed and smart though capable of making terrible mistakes when it comes to matters of the heart.” Other series are described as being “grounded in reality” or “heartwarming” or “what it means to be American,” or focus on “breathtakingly charismatic alpha-heroes who are tamed by spirited independent heroines.”

Gillmor also takes a brave trip to a Harlequin cover audition—the publisher “shoots 120 covers a month,” he writes—to take in an array of firefighters, carefully managed body hair, and Fabio-esque manes. (Check out the Walrus' highly entertaining gallery of Harlequin cover images.)

Source: The Walrus

Images courtesy of The Walrus, a 2009 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for best writing.

“In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers,” begins Mark Penn’s dubious article for the Wall Street Journal, which suggests that nearly 2 million bloggers make money from their work, and for nearly half a million, it is their primary source of income.

Over at Virginia Quarterly Review, Waldo Jaquith takes issue with Penn’s sources as well as his math: “The mind reels at how an apparently-bright guy could write such a fundamentally inaccurate article and get it published in a major U.S. daily.”

Jaquith reports that Penn gleaned his “almost 2 million” paid bloggers from the website blogwordexpo.com, which promotes a blogger conference and thus has a vested interest in building the blogging hype. Yet, even their claim is muted compared to Penn’s.

“1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog,” the website states.

“That’s not to say that they make money,” Jaquith points out, “just that they want to make money. Many people write novels because they want to be rich, but that doesn’t mean that all aspiring novelists are wealthy. So we can see that claim—one of the pillars of Penn’s article—is totally invented.”

Source: Virginia Quarterly Review, Wall Street Journal

  Image by Brett L, licensed under Creative Commons

Featured in this week’s episode:

- Meatpaper’s Pig Issue on how to share a pig, factory-farmed pigs vs. sustainable pigs, and much more (not available online)

- Hunting (and cooking) octopus, from Art Lies

- A collection of dreams about Barack Obama, from the eco-redesigned Geist

- Sustainable architecture in Cape Town, from Azure

Toward the end of the Bush administration, right-wing media was forced to play defense for a beleaguered conservative movement. With Obama in charge, the right-wingers have gone on the attack. So far, that attack has been characterized by “violent, doomsday, and anti-intellectual rhetoric,” according to Media Matters. Rush Limbaugh has says the Obama administration has launched “an all-out assault on capitalism.” Sean Hannity calls the administration, “radicalism you can believe in” asserting that “the Bolsheviks have already arrived.” Media Matters has compiled myriad examples of violent rhetoric, warnings of a “new world order,” scapegoating and other general paranoia coming from the conservative media.

For a more amusing take on the issue, you can watch Current TV’s SuperNews! segment on paranoia poster boy Glenn Beck:

Or Stephen Colbert on the same issue:

Are young people in the digital age perpetually plugged-in drones, or tolerant, politically and socially shrewd citizens with untapped potential? There has always existed a culture gap between educators and their students, but technology seems to have widened it into a chasm. Given the alienation that many educators feel from their students today, the debate over the fate of so-called “Digital Natives” and how to teach them continues.

William Deresiewicz over at The Chronicle Review laments the loss of solitude for today’s youth. He worries for his students and the apparent nonstop nature of their connectedness, from Facebook to Twitter to text messaging.

“Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration,” he writes, “but it is also taking away our ability to be alone.”

Deresiewicz then wonders what this loss portends: “And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life – of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing ‘in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures’, ‘bait[ing our] hooks with darkness.” 

Barry Duncan and Carol Arcus take a less pessimistic stance at the Education Forum of Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation. While acknowledging the concern for Digital Natives’ ability to think critically about the media they consume, Duncan and Arcus instead see an opportunity to “link this multi-sensory, multi-modal, multi-literate experience to new notions of literacy and identity.”

They suggest that “Net Geners” might be “smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors. They are more politically savvy, socially engaged and family-centered than society gives them credit for.”

And, they see in the conversation around teaching Digital Natives the possibility “to figure out and invent ways to include reflection and critical thinking in the learning...but still do it in the Digital Native language.”

Sources: The Chronicle Review, Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation 

Image by Bombardier, licensed under Creative Commons

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today's guest is Dan Sinker, journalism professor and founding editor of Punk Planet magazine. We asked him for five links and here's what he came up with:

"All around the world I've been looking for new..." so sings the Jam's Paul Weller. It's a good song, and a good philosophy for exploring the web as well: Look for new things, and look for them globally. To me, while there's a lot of great stuff happening on the web locally, stretch outside the States and you suddenly unlock the door to the incredible.

Ushahidi: While newspapers in the U.S. struggle to find footing in the great digital reboot, it's exciting to see groups like Ushahidi emerge where nothing existed before using suddenly ubiquitious technologies. Originally started to report on rioting following elections in Kenya in 2008, Ushahidi is now a system for distributing reporting using cellphones with basic SMS text functionality.

Bonus link: I think that mobile technology is where all the action is at, in terms of true leveling of the information space around the globe (there are, after all 4 billion active cell phones around the world now). Peruse MobileActive.org for more exciting innovation in the global mobile space.

Abandoned Japanese Theme Parks : I can't even begin to tell you anything about this project other than the fact that I've known about it for three years and I keep coming back to it time and again. The images are so haunting and strange, I think they will probably stay with you too.

Bonus link: Dig far enough into the collection to find the surreal image of an abandoned Gulliver, still tied up by Lilliputians who long left him for dead. When I am at my absolute worst, I dream of that image. 

The music mashups of Kutiman: This Israeli musician takes snippets of YouTube videos and creates whole orchestras of new sound. I'm going to let a good friend, Kevin Duneman, take the heavy lifting on contextualizing this for you: "It's the art of it that gets me. To be able to tune in so thoroughly and pay that close attention to his source material, that is a seriously classical approach. It makes me think about the near impossibility of having another true master painter, a Rembrandt. This is that, but for now." Exactly right, Kevin. My only addition: On the above embedded video, the last movement of the song, which begins at 4:36, makes me cry every time I hear it--if it doesn't do the same to you, you'd better check that your heart is still beating.

Bonus link: This essay about Kutiman, by Merlin Mann, is simply badass.

Cameras for Kibera: An inspiring, short webdoc about a Dutch endeavor that puts video cameras into the hands of young people living in the Kibera slum in Nairobi Kenya. A good reminder of how transformative technologies we take for granted can be when placed into the right hands and the right contexts.

Added bonus: Rocketboom, the site that this video originates from, is worth a daily visit for sure.

Projeto Secreto: Brazillian journalist Denis Burgierman returned from a year in the States and set out on the road, in a tiny car, to document the growing DIY youth culture of Brazil. The goal is to create a new kind of magazine for this new generation of mediamakers (those who have grown up free from the shadow of dictatorship and open to the possibilities of a digital revolution). Entirely written in Portuguese (so brush up, or install Ubiquity--detailed below), this blog offers a unique look into a unique time in a unique land.

Bonus link:The final magazine concept as presented in this Flickr set makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Bonus bonus link: Ubiquity, translation made easy. The Mozilla Foundation has a project called Ubiquity that's a little confusing to explain in full (go to their site for the full explanation though, like me, you may still be confused), but it's a tool that I use for a single purpose: translating text from web pages in place. Once you've installed Ubiquity into your Firefox browser, you can simply select text, right click (or, on a Mac control-click) on it and a contextual menu will open up that allows you to choose, simply Translate, and Ubiquity will do the heavy lifting of figuring out what language it is, translating the text, and--to me this is the best part--placing the newly translated text back into position on the very website you're looking at. The first few times you use it, it's like magic.

BIO: Dan Sinker teaches in the journalism department at Columbia College Chicago where he focuses on entrepreneurial journalism and the mobile web. He was the founding editor of the influential underground culture magazine Punk Planet until its closure in 2007 and is the editor of We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, The Collected Interviews. He blogs about media for the Huffington Post and makes videos about DIY businesses at the website hangingbyashoestring.

Previous Alt Wire Guests: Phil Yu, Matt Novak, Jason Marsh, David LaBounty, Jen Angel, Will Braun, Regan Hofmann, Josh Breitbart, Andrew Lam,  Jessica Valenti, Jessica Hoffmann, Noah Scalin, Rinku Sen, Paddy Johnson, Melissa Mcewan,  Fatemeh Fakhraie , Joe Biel, Anne Elizabeth Moore 

At Crumpled Press, a young, independent bookmaking outfit based in Brooklyn, each book is a tactile treasure—custom cut, bone folded, and hand sewn. In a profile for University of Chicago Magazine, Melissa F. Pheterson writes of how the press’s four editors collaborate with each author “to create a book’s artisinal feel...to savor the printed-page aesthetic in an era of digitized technology.”

For each edition, the press hosts binding parties in McIntyre’s loft, with about a dozen crafty friends paid in snacks and conversation. “It’s like quilting,” says founding editor Jordan McIntyre. “It’s a homespun model that people miss.”

Since 2005, Crumpled Press has used this homespun model to publish ten titles, and the business is flourishing, with consumers drawn in by the books’ homemade beauty. While sales were in the low double digits for their first four publications, recent titles like Anthony Grafton’s Codex in Crisis (2008), a treatise on the digitization of books, and Derek McGee’s When I Wished I Was Here: Dispateches from Fallujah (2007) have sold several hundred copies.

“The standard line is that digitization kills books,” says editor Alexander Bick. “I think it’s more accurate to say there’s a symbiosis. The Internet generates most of our sales. We use digital technology like laser printing to produce our books…Our success contradicts the idea that bookmaking no longer makes sense.”

The American educational system is experiencing a crisis in literacy. Too many students are falling behind in the critical reading skills that provide the fundamentals of a successful education. At the same time, teachers lament the excessive time students spend on digital media like video games and television.

Though teachers may be loath to admit it, digital media provide an opportunity to revive the American educational system, James Paul Gee and Michael Levine write for Democracy Journal. Educators should use students’ enthusiasm for video games, television, and mobile devices to teach the skills needed to succeed in the modern marketplace.

“The current approach to the literacy crisis is locked in a time warp,” according to Gee and Levine, “almost totally removed from the ubiquitous digital media consumption that currently drives children’s lives.”

The solution to America’s literacy crisis, and the increasingly problematic digital divide, lies beyond simple access to technology. Gee and Levine suggest in a creating a “digital teaching corps,” modeled on programs like Teach for America, which would send bright young teachers into low-performing schools to mentor children on technology and communication. The writers also propose the creation of digital community centers, staffed by the digital teaching corps, to increase access to the technology as well. On a federal level, the government should modernize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and take educational programs like Sesame Street and The Electric Company into the digital age.

Teachers need to move beyond the “book-centered” learning, which too often devolves into standardized test prep, and explore “experience-centered” learning that digital media provides. This way, schools can modernize their overhead projectors and filmstrips to give students the skills they need in an increasingly digitized world.

Image by  Michael Surran , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Sources: Democracy Journal (excerpt available online)

POZ, an indispensable magazine of “life, health, & HIV,” turns 15 this year—and to mark its anniversary, the publication is donating all advertising revenue from its forthcoming May issue to the Denver Principles Project, a new initiative from the National Association of People with AIDS (NAPWA) that seeks to dramatically increase the group’s membership and, as it follows, political and social clout.

In its March issue, POZ asks people to (re)commit to the cause:

The last eight years have seen a dramatic reversal of what our movement accomplished in the early years:

• Science-based HIV prevention programs have been gutted in favor of abstinence-only or abstinence-until-marriage programs. The result? Hundreds of thousands of new HIV infections, mostly among young people of color.
• Hysteria-driven prosecution of people with HIV for failing to disclose their status has helped create an image of so-called “AIDS Monsters” in the media and further fueled the criminalization—and stigmatization—of people with HIV. The result? We are increasingly marginalized and portrayed as vectors of disease who must be controlled and regulated rather than as what we are: human beings struggling with a life-threatening disease who deserve compassion, human rights and adequate, affordable health care.
• While the United States has technically lifted the specific ban on HIV-positive people from entering the country, HIV remains on the list of contagious diseases that can be used to prohibit people with HIV from immigrating to or visiting America. The result? The nation that represents itself as a beacon of freedom is, instead, a leader in discrimination, setting a shameful example of intolerance and ignorance.

Now, it is time for all people who want to end the AIDS epidemic to recommit to the spirit of The Denver Principles—thus ensuring that the voices of people with HIV are heard.

In addition to donating May’s ad revenue, POZ also will republish the original Denver Principles manifesto, which, drafted in 1983, articulated the foundation of the self-empowerment movement for people with HIV/AIDS. To get involved in the Denver Principles Project, visit NAPWA online.

More to read/love: POZ is an Utne Independent Press Award winner for health/wellness coverage. Its editor in chief Regan Hofmann recently guest blogged for our daily best-of-the-web extravaganza, Alt Wire.

Source: POZ

The new issue of the Weekly Standard arrived in the mail today. Here are some alternative headlines they could have used:

Tough Times in Stereotypesville
Culturally Insensitive Times in Conservatopia
Shrillride in Wingnut City
Schadenfreude in Weekly Standarstown
Rollercoaster to Racism

Source: Weekly Standard 

While the troubled economy takes its toll on community radio across the country, at least one radio program continues to thrive. Shelley Bluejay Pierce reports for Native American Times that Native American Radio Live (NARL) hosted by Albert Raymond Cata is going strong. NARL broadcasts out of Santa Fe Public Radio, KSFR, and has served its diverse community for 17 years.

Sixty-four year-old Cata, a master storyteller from Ohkay Owingeh (formerly San Juan Pueblo), New Mexico, started his radio career in 1986 after retiring from the U.S. Air Force.

“All I know about broadcasting I learned as I went,” he says. “I was interested in people and like the music and wanted to share with others about who the Native American person is within the fabric of general society.”

His advice to other radio programmers in this economy?

“You have to keep on top of your community needs. You need programs that address what interests the listeners and that include everything from music, politics, sports, school events, community fund drives and even gardening...The trouble I see for many community radio shows is that they don’t have a true ‘format’ and are not focused on the needs of their communities.”

Check out how Cata meets those needs on NARL’s website, which features interviews with prominent Native American politicians, artists and storytellers, including actor Adam Beach, known for his stirring performances in Smoke Signals, written by Sherman Alexie, and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers.

Or, listen to Native American Radio Live streaming every Saturday from 3:00-5:00 Mountain Daylight Time.

Source: Native American Times

Many of the most recognizable, creative, inane, offensive, and juvenile ads today come from one advertising agency: Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. In the latest issue of Creative Review, Eliza Williams looks at what makes the agency so widely popular and intensely reviled at the same time. Here are a few of their recent ad campaigns:

-- Innovative: Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application, written about on this website.
-- Sophomoric: Whopper Freakout Ads, where surly Burger King customers, deprived of Whoppers, threaten employees on hidden cameras.
-- Funny: Hulu’s ads starring Alec Baldwin.
-- Confusing: The Microsoft ads starring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.
-- Culturally insensitive (and borderline imperialistic): Whopper Virgins ads, which feature taste tests given to people supposedly untouched by fast food advertising.

The company’s mastery of digital advertising began back in 2004 with the Subservient Chicken website, a collaboration with the Barbarian Group marketing firm. Now the CP + B “has been heralded by many as representing a model for the ad agency of the future,” according to Creative Review. The root of their success may lie in the offense people seem to take at their advertising. Williams writes, “Its work may not be pretty, and it may at times centre on a certain style of frat boy humour, but it will always get our attention and get us talking.”

Concerned taxpayers might wonder how and where our money is being dispersed via the Obama stimulus package, especially considering that the Bush stimulus of last year seems to have evaporated into the ether with no accountability. Investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica tracks the stimulus evolution in detail, focusing on Obama’s transparency pledge. 

In a recent report, Michael Grabell explores the myriad challenges facing Obama's promise, including who gets to spend the money and how it gets monitored. As an example, Grabell examines the ill-fated Xanadu project in New Jersey, a multi-million dollar entertainment complex that has been mired in delays due to increased costs and allegations of corruption. The same regional authority in charge of Xanadu will oversee another “shovel-ready” project under the Obama stimulus—a $9 billion rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Can the new Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (“RAT” as some call it) prevent another debacle like Xanadu?

As money flows through the states, some of it will go to local and regional organizations that operate with little oversight. Additionally, the stimulus plan’s wide reach, which touches everything from public housing to space exploration, invites a certain amount of abuse as its sheer size increases opportunities for corruption.

ProPublica and its partner ShovelWatch will be an ongoing source for following stimulus spending. Its web space includes a regularly updated chart that tracks individual state transparency websites and a projects list released by state and federal agencies.

Source: ProPublica 

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. We asked today's guest, Shakesville blogger Melissa McEwan, for five great links. Here's what happened (check back for Monday's guest, Paddy Johnson of Artfagcity):

Five links, they tell me. They asked me because they know I am a wicked, insurrectionary, feminist malcontent, and so they should not be surprised that my first order of business is breaking the rules. These are my seven deadly sins of the internets:

Lust—Glasvegas, my current unquenchable music crush, whose "Go Square Go" puts me in a Scottish pub during a footie match so certainly I check my shoetops for spilt ale.

Gluttony—Feminist Literature, a compilation of the full texts of feminist literature available online, a virtual pâtisserie of delectables begging me to devour them whole and savor indulgently every nourishing morsel.

Greed—Fluevog, shoes in which to rule the world; my altar, my church, my Mecca, at which one day I will make these mine.

Sloth—The Chicago Museums, which, combined, can create a timesuck of link-adventuring so cavernous it is rivaled only by the devilry of YouTube's related videos lists.

Wrath—Care.org, an international humanitarian organization fighting poverty while centralizing women's issues, more accurately described as the antidote to my wrath, a catharsis, the means by which my anger is translated into action.

Envy—Rachel, whose recaps of my favorite show, "Lost," make me laugh until I am gasping for air and are one of the very few things on the internet that ever make me think, "I wish I'd written that…"

Pride—Comment is free, the Guardian's blog collective, the grand ambitiousness of which is rivaled only by its capacity to deliver, and I am proud to be a (very) small part.

BIO: Melissa McEwan is the founder and editor of the cultural blog Shakesville, which was highlighted in the Utne Reader's survey of the feminist blogosphere.  McEwan also contributes to Comment is free America and AlterNet, and lives just outside Chicago with three cats and a Scotsman.

Previous Alt Wire Guests:  Fatemeh Fakhraie ,  Joe Biel ,  Anne Elizabeth Moore  

With the media in freefall, newspapers are fighting to survive and journalism schools are struggling to stay relevant. The Anniston Star newspaper and the University of Alabama have found a partnership that could help both. Using a grant from the Knight Foundation, the Anniston Star has started accepting master’s students for a community journalism program to pitch and report stories and supplement the newspaper’s editorial coverage.

The move was met with some resistance from the paper’s editorial staff. Troy Turner, who was the executive editor of the Star before the program began, told the American Journalism Review, “They wanted a training model like a Navy hospital ship. But we worked like a battleship, with all guns blazing. We wanted to continue doing the solid journalism that the Anniston Star had long been known for doing.” Now that the program has started, however, Turner admits that the it’s having some success.

Other journalism schools haven’t had as easy of a time adjusting. When the New York Times partnered with the City University of New York for their own community journalism project, “The Local,” New York Magazine reports that the move was seen as a slight to the University of Columbia venerable journalism school.

Since then Columbia has increased its efforts to stay current. According to New York Magazine, the school will soon offer “a revamped, digitally focused curriculum designed to make all students as capable of creating an interactive graphic as they are of pounding out 600 words on a community-board meeting.” But just as many old-school journalists don’t want to dive into blogging, professors at Columbia are less than enthusiastic about going digital. Ari Goldman, a 16-year professor of Columbia’s Reporting and Writing 1 (RW1) class, is quoted as saying “fuck new media,” describing the move to digital as “an experimentation in gadgetry.”

Image by Bluemarine, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Source: American Journalism Review, New York Magazine 

The internet poo-bahs at Technorati say that blog authority is dropping. The most popular blogs on the internet have seen their “authority” scores, based on the number of other blogs linking to them, go down recently, even if their ranks relative to the rest of the internet remain the same.

This loss of blog authority doesn’t point to a loss of importance, Brian Solis writes for TechCrunch. It shows that the way people consume media has changed. Instead of writing competing blog posts, people are increasingly turning to Twitter or Facebook to respond and make their voices heard.

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

Now people need to figure out new ways to measure the importance of blogs, taking social networking and non-traditional derivative content into consideration. Solis writes, “Now, we have the ability to instantly interact with, respond, or promote blog content away from the source blog, but that shouldn’t make the original post any less valuable.”

Source: TechCrunch 

The most iconic images of the Great Depression passed through Dorothea Lange's camera. These days you can't help but see the ghosts of Lange's portraits in photos and video footage from the darkest corners of the current economic crisis. Clinical Psychologist and blogger Michael Shaw makes a dreadfully direct link, blogging at the always compelling BAGnewsNotes about a series of tent city photos taken in Sacramento, California, the same city where Lange took photos like these:

Compare those shots to this photograph of Karen Hersh, an out of work truck driver, cleaning her Sacramento tent city home several decades later.

The online magazine Slate has invited readers to submit photographs from the economic crisis to its Flickr page, and Lange is there too. A standout of the submissions so far is this photograph of a tent pitched on a blighted corner of Portland, Oregon.

In Slate's call for photographs, they lay out the challenge of photographing this new depression: "You can't take a photograph of a collateralized debt obligation."

Sources: BAGnewsNotes, Slate, Library of Congress 

Images by Dorothea Lange

When I come across new writers on the internet, I almost instinctively Google their names. If I’m really motivated, I’ll check Facebook to see if they’ve got a photo. Call me superficial, but I like to put a face to the writing.

That face can also distract readers and critics from what’s really important—the writing. On Virginia Quarterly Review's blog, Jacob Silverman explores the “hot-or-not syndrome” that’s infected publishing, pointing to the a heated discussion over novelist Marisha Pessl's come-hither book-jacket photo (seen left). The website Gawker, for example, called her, “book hot,” “TV hot,” “college admissions brochure hot,” and “Eliminated first episode of Top Model Cycle hot.”

Minimal space in that coverage was devoted to Pessl’s abilities as a writer, even though her novel was generally well received. Since “no one publishes a book of literary fiction because of how its author looks in a single photograph,” according to Silverman, most of this superficial coverage amounts to a distraction provided by lazy critics.

Outside the realm of literary fiction, where personalities like Julia Allison can get famous for being good looking and great self promoters, the problem could be a bit more serious.

(Thanks, the Millions.)

Source: Virginia Quarterly Review 

Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti shares the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what's landing in our library each week.

Featured in this week’s episode:

- "Adultery and Other Half Revolutions," from Briarpatch

- A two-mom family discovers the joy of half-siblings, and Noemi Martinez embraces the notion that activism begins at home, from Hip Mama (not available online)

- New Internationalist on the continuing scourge of maternal deaths

- The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report on "The Year in Hate"

Sources: Briarpatch, Hip Mama, New Internationalist, Intelligence Report

Am I the only one who’s been amused by the Wall Street Journal’s hyperbolic headlines in the Obama era? Every few days it seems there’s a “most read” opinion-page article topped by a headline that should have been published during the Bush administration—but never was. Here are my recent laugh-out-loud favorites:

“The President Politicizes Stem-Cell Research” (today). Bush of course was the guy who turned this issue into a red-meat feed for the conservative base. To suggest that Obama is suddenly politicizing it by reversing Bush’s science-challenged research ban is not just blind to the obvious but comically absurd.

“ Is the Administration Winging It? ” (February 18). Whooee, what a gem. The title of this opinion piece could have applied to the entire Dubya reign, whose hallmark was recklessness, ignorance, and incompetence, from an unnecessary and abysmally planned war to the hapless “heck of a job, Brownie” Hurricane Katrina response. What’s even better is the byline on this one: Karl Rove. Stop it, my sides hurt.

“ Presidential Bait-and-Switch ” (March 5). The premise here, also a Rove construction, is that Americans voted for a leader who, as soon as he was in office, changed his tune—and that this occurred in the 2008 election, not 2000 or 2004. Remember the phrase “I’m a uniter, not a divider”? How about “I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders”? Bush was a serial bait-and-switcher, whereas Obama so far is basically carrying out the sort of change he promised, as one Journal reader pointed out in response.

Harold R. Garner didn’t set out to uncover plagiarists. He and his team of researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas wanted to develop software to help researchers find papers that covered congruent topic areas. The idea was to point out similar research, and hopefully to uncover new directions for study. What they found, according to Science News, was widespread un-credited copying in scientific journals.

Some reactions to Garner’s findings have been posted by The Scientist. One author who may have been plagiarized told the magazine, “We were very sorry and somewhat surprised when we found their article. I don't want to accept them as scientists.”

One accused plagiarist’s defense was predictably scientific:

There are probably only 'x' amount of word combinations that could lead to 'y' amount of statements.... I have no idea why the pieces are similar, except that I am sure I do not have a good enough memory—and it is certainly not photographic—to have allowed me to have 'copied' his piece.

Most media outlets have hit already the panic button. Print, radio, and online publications are struggling to survive. TV, on the other hand, is still riding high. The Project for Excellence in Journalism identifies local TV as “one of the few sources of news that continues to be popular.” And TV viewership is currently at an all-time high, according to Nielsen, with Americans watching more than 151 hours of TV per month.

In spite of their huge reach, Michael Schaffer writes for the New Republic of a “fiery economic crash” for the local TV news anchors. The current recession may be helping the local anchors get famous in the short term, because television stations are running more promos for their anchors as they struggle to find advertisers. Long term, however, Schaffer writes that TV news will likely suffer the same gradual obsolecessence that other legacy news outlets are currently experiencing. The celebrity status held by the news anchors is simply making their fate creep a bit more slowly.

Maybe they could stave off their fate a bit longer if people saw a little more of this:

Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti shares the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what's landing in our library each week. Utne's library is abuzz with a steady flow of 1,300 magazines, journals,weeklies, zines, and other dispatches from the independent press.

Featured in this week’s episode:

- "Why we make art," from Greater Good 

- The Progressive on toxic computer-recycling programs at federal prisons (not yet available online)

- Dambisa Moyo, outspoken critic of aid to Africa, in the conservative British magazine Standpoint 

- Pretty birds in Botswana, courtesy of Living Bird (not yet available online)

Sources: Greater Good, The Progressive, Standpoint, Living Bird

Bloggers and bookstores are often kindred spirits, but many bloggers link to the Amazon page for books they discuss in their posts. IndieBound recently added a book-linking feature that provides a user-friendly alternative: bloggers can link to book information and cover art on IndieBound, and users who follow the link and want to purchase the book can enter their zip code to find it at a local store. 

The bookseller/blogger Bookavore is on a mission to rally her fellow bloggers in support of independent bookstores. "I’d like to encourage as many people as possible to, when using a link that is about a book, link to IndieBound," she writes in a recent post. "I’m not asking anyone to stop linking anywhere, just to start linking to IndieBound as well (although, of course, I won’t stop anybody who decides to exclusively link to IndieBound; in fact, I might kiss them)."

Sources: Bookavore, IndieBound 

Radio Afia, a half-hour radio show broadcast three times daily in Darfur, Sudan, and eastern Chad, started with a noble mission: To provide Darfuri citizens mired in war or displaced by violence with objective news and information about the crisis—the kind they weren’t getting from the Sudanese government. But poor execution has left the promise of that mission unfulfilled, according to a report by Sheri Fink for ProPublica.

Started with funding from the U.S. State Department, Radio Afia’s critics blame its failings on cultural ignorance and a soft approach to coverage of the Sudanese government. The program is broadcast in standard Arabic, which critics say most of the intended audience not only can’t understand, but find “offensive because it [is] associated with the people who were killing them,” according to Fink. Radio Afia has also come under scrutiny for the firing of one of its outspoken newscasters, who reportedly battled with his bosses over what he saw as their lax coverage of the government. 

If true, the shortcomings of Radio Afia identified by its critics are disappointing considering the continued scarcity of free information in Sudan, which the project was intended to combat. According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, government censorship of media and tight control of free speech is escalating. “Free and fair elections require a free and open media,” said Georgette Gagnon of Human Rights Watch in a press release about the report. “Khartoum's repressive practices and abuse of those who criticize it put such elections at great risk.” And as violence in Darfur intensifies, writes Fink, "[g]etting news to Darfuri civilians is more important than ever.” 

Sources: ProPublica, Human Rights Watch 

Image by hdptcar, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Columbia Journalism Review has compiled a hefty list of goodbyes from Rocky Mountain News staffers. The paper published its last issue today.

Bracing thoughts from sports columnist Dave Krieger:

Honestly? The corporate suits come in and cry their crocodile tears, then whiz on home to continue collecting their seven-figure salaries, pleased to have rid their shareholders of the albatross that was a helluva newspaper. Scripps is in the best financial shape of any newspaper company in America, save the Washington Post Co. . . .

We need publishers with vision and conviction and courage and it’s beginning to look like all we have are profiteers born on third base.

A eulogy of sorts from reporter Tillie Fong:

I feel the Rocky‘s closing as a death—not as an institution but as a part of my life, a part of ME, that has died.

I always felt that the Rockywas this feisty little paper that reflects the spirit of the people that it serves—fiercely independent, outspoken, active, but also caring and compassionate. 

Romenesko posted a Denver Post memo listing the Rocky journalists it's hired; check out the rest of Romenesko's ongoing coverage here.

Sources: Columbia Journalism Review, Romenesko 

Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti shares the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what's landing in our library each week.

Utne's library is abuzz with a steady flow of 1,300 magazines, journals,weeklies, zines, and other dispatches from the cultural front that are rarely found in big-box bookstores or newsstands. 

Featured in this week’s episode: 

- High Country News on remembering the nuclear west

- The state of American charcuterie, from The Art of Eating (not available online)

- Nigerian author Chris Abani on humanity and writing, in a special issue of Witness on “Dismissing Africa” (PDF)

- Advice for activists on running productive meetings, from Red Pepper (not available online)

Sources: High Country News, The Art of Eating, Witness, Red Pepper

Looking for a job?  Ben Parr directs Mashable readers to “30+ Websites to Visit When You’re Laid Off.”  He handily divides unemployment strategies into five steps, including finding psychological support and managing money, and then lists sites that will help within each step.  While Craigslist and Monster might be familiar, the Careeronestop Unemployment Benefits map might be news to you, not to mention sites like Workstir for contractors and Hotgigs for freelance consultants.

Source: Mashable

Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti shares the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what's landing in our library each week in 'Shelf Life.'

Utne's library is abuzz with a steady flow of 1,300 magazines, journals, weeklies, zines, and other dispatches from the cultural front that are rarely found in big-box bookstores, or newsstands.

Featured in this week's episode:

- enRoute on Icelandic cuisine

- Science News on “The Dating Go Round”

- A special issue of Southwest Review featuring modern fiction by Arab women (not available online)

- Zine excerpts and Canadian tabloids in Broken Pencil (not available online)

- Nuclear Energy Insight on how a nuclear power plant became a “refuge” for sea turtles 

Sources: enRoute, Science News, Southwest Review, Broken Pencil, Nuclear Energy Insight

Imagine setting up a collective—a business venture, perhaps—tied strictly to majority vote. . . and then two successful decades later, finding yourself consistently in the minority. No harm, no foul, AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan tells the East Bay Express. In “Beyond Anarchy at PM Press,” Rachel Swan profiles the publisher’s amicable 2007 departure from AK Press and his current project: PM Press, which is armed with “all the attributes that helped AK at its inception: inexhaustible creativity; a staff of idealists willing to volunteer their time; [and] imaginative ways of bringing print to the digital realm.”

Kanaan tells East Bay Express that he's happy to see more of his ideas coming to fruition. " 'It's not that I want to be a dictator," said the publisher, explaining that PM is in fact more collectively minded than AK. It's just easier to run a collective when everyone agrees with you."

Source:  East Bay Express  

In our continuous search for helpful reporting on the stimulus package, we’ve discovered ShovelWatch, a joint effort by investigative news organization ProPublica, morning news program The Takeaway, and New York public radio station WNYC.  This highly-recommended website features accessible, detailed, and down-to-earth information on the most relevant components of the stimulus, including a state-by-state spending breakdown, a detailed list of stimulus provisions, and an interactive U.S. map that shows how infrastructure money will be dispersed.  Also includes a handy aggregate of updated reporting on the stimulus from around the web.  The website is still evolving, so check back regularly to watch where the money goes.

Sources: ShovelWatch, ProPublica, The Takeaway, WNYC

With the economy sliding down the tubes, corporate spinmeisters are struggling to come up with new ways to talk about financial woes. Here are a few great linguistic innovations that have come out of the recession so far:

“A retention award” (executive bonus for a government bailed-out bank, via the Huffington Post.)

“Public capital facilitation” (bank nationalization, via the Economist.)

“streamlining and simplification” (Ebay’s layoffs, via Gawker.)

“synergy-related headcount adjustment goal” (Nokia’s layoffs, via Dollars & Sense.)

Sources: Huffington Post, Economist, Gawker, Dollars & Sense 

Some of Quividi’s marketing technologies carry a distinctly Big Brother vibe. Lately, the French company's gotten attention for developing billboard software that uses cameras to gather demographic information about passersby. On the Media recently sat down with Quividi’s chief scientific officer, Paolo Prandoni, to learn how the signs work and gauge how creeped out we ought to be.

In the interview, Prandoni works hard to make the technology sound harmless. He assures listeners that the cameras never record images of people. He also observes that the software isn’t sophisticated enough to reveal much about a person—apparently, it can guess at gender and age based on an analysis of basic bodily features, but not much else.

Prandoni's pretty sure that the static billboard will become obsolete. He thinks tools like Quividi's will eventually allow marketers to tailor their content in reaction to the people moving through a space. Whether or not you buy his argument that Quividi technology is more or less benign, the technology is probably here to stay, and no doubt will continue to evolve. 

Image courtesy of cangaroojack, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sources: On the Media 

Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti shares the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what’s landing in our library each week in 'Shelf Life.'

Utne’s library is abuzz with a steady flow of 1,300 magazines, newsletters, journals, weeklies, zines, and other lively dispatches from the cultural front that are rarely found at big-box bookstores, or newsstands.

Featured in this week's episode:

- The "Jobless in America" feature in the February 23 issue of The Nation

- Dollars &Sense on "The New Political Economy of Immigration"

- The Texas Observer on Janet Napolitano and the border fence

- "Entertaining in the Recession" from Houston's My Table (not available online)

-Alpacas. That's right, Alpacas. From Radish

Sources: The Nation, Dollars & Sense, The Texas Observer, My Table, Radish

With umpteen publications commemorating the 50th anniversary of Castro’s Cuban Revolution, several newspapers are simultaneously waiting for the dictator to pass on. Editor & Publisher senior editor Joe Strupp gives a breakdown of the extensive plan the Miami Herald has in place for when Castro finally shuffles off this mortal coil.

According to Manny Garcia, the senior news editor for the Herald, Castro is “the journalistic equivalent of a kidney stone -- a constant pain who never seems to go away, and you pray that he passes, soon.” Morbid and a tad insensitive, maybe, but the fact remains that Fidel has stubbornly stayed alive and in power despite failing health and near-constant rumors that he’s suffered a heart attack or slipped into a coma or died in his sleep.

The preparation for the actual event of his death is of epic proportions. “The Cuba plan,” as Garcia calls it, is a three-ring binder filled with information and contact numbers necessary to the story. “The Cuba plan went on a Mediterranean cruise with my family. It's been to Barcelona, Rome, Vancouver, Disney World -- even down North Carolina's Nanthahala River -- safely tucked in a waterproof bag while my son and I rafted.” The Herald already has several different versions of Castro’s obit tailored to time of day or night, plus a range of photos from young to old and an in memoriam webpage ready to go online at a moment’s notice. And when Fidel dies, no matter what the staff members are doing, no matter where they are, everyone is under strict orders to report for duty.

Image by factor_, licensed under Creative Commons.

Public television's international news show, Worldfocus, has entered into a first-of-its-kind partnership with GroundReport to air a new segment consisting entirely of videos produced by GroundReport’s extensive network of citizen journalists. According to the Editors Weblog, this is “the first time that a mainstream U.S. channel has committed to airing a citizen journalism segment on prime time television.”

The first segment asks global contributors to send in their advice for President Obama. Submissions are due February 15.

Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti shares the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what’s landing in our library each week in ‘From the Stacks.’ 

Utne’s library is abuzz with a steady flow of 1,300 magazines, newsletters, journals, weeklies, zines, and other lively dispatches from the cultural front that are rarely found at big-box bookstores, or newsstands.

Featured in this week's video:

- Brazil's "Lambe Lambe" tradition, profiled in Creative Review 

- A Virginia Quarterly Review report on depression and suicide rates in Cuba 

- The Punk Rock Fun Time Activity Book from ECW Press 

- Make a Zine by Microcosm Publishing 

- The Terrapin turtles of Chesapeake Quarterly 

There’s an arms race taking place between advertisers and viewers, where people block out ads with TiVo or DVR, and companies slip more ads into peoples lives through evermore ingenious tactics. The battle could be self-defeating, because, according to a new study from the NYU Stern School of Business, viewers enjoy TV more when they watch ads.

The more time people spend in front of the TV, the less enjoyable it becomes, according to the study. Ads break up the routine, James Hibberd writes on his blog, and “the interruption helps re-freshen the novelty of the program.”

Most viewers adamantly disagree with the study’s findings, and the study’s authors admit, “Consumers prefer to watch television programs without commercials.” A commenter on Hibberd’s blog put it another way: “No offense but this article is complete crap journalism and comes off sounding like faux-industry sponsored ‘research’. It's like saying soldiers enjoy combat because it gets them out of the house.”

(Thanks, Mediabistro.)

Image by  Stephen Bowler , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Before the media imploded, journalists were allowed to spend months researching in-depth stories and exposés. Today, that style of journalism is “seen as taking too long and costing too much,” former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune James Warren writes for the Atlantic. The parasitic internet is to blame, according to Warren, where “attitude and attack are often valued more than precision and truth” and content is given away for free.

The problem that Warren doesn’t focus on is that newspapers, which still “serve as daily tip sheets for other media outlets,” were caught unprepared for the rise of the internet. It’s not as though they didn’t have time to adjust, back when they were still flush with cash. Here’s a video from 1981, when downloading a paper took more than 2 hours, and cost $5.00 per hour.

Young people in Swaziland will soon be able to connect to their peers via “Ses’khona,” the country’s first youth-driven radio program, set to air weekly starting this month. The project is an extension of “Super Buddies,” a UNICEF-backed children’s outreach program and magazine that started in 2003. Both the radio show and the magazine are Swaziland’s only examples of media by and for children.

The show will be broadcast on the government station and features directors, producers, and reporters ages 12-14. With a huge majority of the population getting their news from the radio, along with an overwhelmingly positive response from test audiences, Ses’khona will give a voice to the oft-ignored youth demographic. The name translated from SiSwati to English means “We’re here,” but its original connotation is one of “the arrival of a group that intends to stay and be heard.”

For those who’d call current sports journalism fluff: Gary Andrew Poole agrees with you. In an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review, though, he muses that it needn’t be. The shortcomings he bemoans—an emphasis on sensational stories, a move away from longer narrative work—aren't specific to sports writing, and neither are the market pressures he observes: the growing importance of web reporting, the increasingly rapid turnover of news items.

But Poole argues that sports writers are uniquely positioned to resist these trends. After all, fans can probably live without to-the-second updates on batting averages and shoulder injuries. A renewed focus on thoughtful analysis and creative storytelling might remind us why sports matter in the big picture, by exploring how they reflect our cultural values and imagination. Take a look at the article to hear Poole elaborate and to catch some insightful comments from readers, or consider other reasons why sportswriting has lost its game. 

Image courtesy of Kevin Klöcker, licensed under Creative Commons.

If you never picked up a copy of MAP Magazine, the Miami based art and culture quarterly, you blew it. It’s gone now—shuttered by a cash-strapped publisher with a completed issue ready for the printer. It’s the cruelest brand of magazine death. That interview with Gore Vidal and Chip Kidd? Gone. That piece on the art scene in Berlin? On a hard drive somewhere. The multiple covers created exclusively for the issue by an esteemed art collective? Wasted time.

We first got word of MAP’s demise from Twitter user themediaisdying. An email to (former) MAP editor Omar Sommereyns bounced. We finally tracked him down and arranged an interview. What follows is a little bit of inside baseball and a lot of hurt. And it’s reminder that the best magazines are a labor of love first and a business second. That might be why the best magazines don’t always make it.

UTNE READER: You only made it to six issues. What happened?

OMAR SOMMEREYNS: Yes, it was six issues, but MAP was a quarterly culture publication packed with content. There was always a lot to read—no cheap tidbits only feature narratives, interviews, a fashion section, and columns.

I knew that it would be a serious challenge. Part of it was the location. In Miami the publishing arena is mostly plagued by vacuous glossies and ad-rags. This isn't exactly a literary town. It had never encountered a magazine with a truly intellectual and culturally-relevant approach; with more long-form pieces and serious content.

Our subscriptions, feedback on the content, and readership kept growing exponentially with each issue. But the marketing people were still not selling enough ads, and the economic downturn certainly didn't help. It simply came to a point where the publishers couldn't afford to produce the magazine anymore. 

UR: I remember being surprised to learn the magazine was out of Miami.

OS: MAP was really created out of need. There was nothing like it down here, and we felt that there needed to be, especially since there is a compelling culture scene in Miami that gets overlooked by excessively disseminated South Beach stereotypes. And in addition to covering interesting aspects of the local scene, we offered features and interviews on an international level—from an insider's reportage on the surreal world of Bollywood to an interview with reclusive and famed French writer Michel Houellebecq. 

UR: Are you proud of what MAP accomplished in six issues?

OS: I'm happy we managed to create a visually and editorially stimulating publication with very little resources. I mean, our editorial budget was hardly commensurate to what we accomplished, and we were able to build something meaningful for a while, thanks to the gracious efforts and talents of several writers, artists, photographers, and dear friends of mine. Art director Andrew Bouchie’s innovative design for the magazine was a big part of its success—readers would constantly commend the design, in addition to the stories themselves.

I feel stifled and frustrated since we weren't even close to reaching our apex, and the creative progression of the magazine was utterly halted. I was still full of ideas and just coming close to realizing how far we could go creatively with MAP. 

UR: How quickly did MAP's publisher shut out the lights? Were you given any warning at all?

OS: I had a sense that things weren't going well for some time, but I was quite disappointed that we didn't get to publish our Winter 08/09 issue. It was by far our strongest—a whole new level for us. A few days before going to press, my publishers let me know that the magazine was shutting down, with everything paid for, except we couldn't afford to publish that last issue. That'll always haunt me. 

UR: Should anybody be starting a magazine like MAP in this climate?

I would never say no. I commend and encourage any endeavors in independent publishing, but people should be aware that it's really going to be a battle, most notably in establishing a good dichotomy between editorial integrity and business acumen, while trying to make money and stay afloat.

I think we tried our best at MAP. Many great publications and creative activity spring from tough times. It all depends on people's moxie and true independent spirit, plus constant faith in your vision. And, of course, real financial backing to begin with helps a lot. Nonetheless, with any publication like this, there's always a risk factor, but you just kind of have to jump in and see if it works.

MAP Magazine launched in Spring 2007 and was shuttered in December 2008. The magazine is still online and worth a visit--if only to download PDF files of each issue for your digital archives.

At an undisclosed location, somewhere in the United States, a public relations man is chronicling the demise of the media as we know it—and he’s doing it in short bursts of 140 characters or less.

If you are a journalist or media organization who is not on Twitter, you should be. And once you’re there, you should subscribe to the daily beating that is a Twitter feed called themediaisdying.

There you’ll find the rat-a-tat-tat of daily media executions. Here’s a sampling of the devastation:

VIBE has lost an associate music editor, Shanel Odum.

MAD MAGAZINE is going quarterly

VARIETY could have cuts this week

The February WIRED is only 113 pages, of which only 31.5 are ad pages - not the usual 1:1 ratio.

It is brutal, but that is not its founder’s intention. “It started as a closed group of our eight founders,” the anonymous ringleader of themediaisdying (lets call him Mr. Dying) tells Utne Reader. Each of the eight founders are employed in the public relations industry—either in-house or on a freelance basis. The Twitter account was mostly a way to keep track of their clients (and potential clients) in the print media industry. “But the point of Twitter is to be open, right? So we opened it up.” The open account launched on December 19 with this posting: "RUMOR: LA TIMES is considering getting rid of its national and foreign bureaus. Can anyone confirm?”

Today themediaisdying has more than 10,000 followers and gets upwards of 75 tips a day. A tip could take the form of a leaked memo or it could be an e-mail that simply reads: “Hey, I just got fired.”

“I’m spending about 90 minutes a day on Twittering and following up on leads,” says Mr. Dying, who resents the characterization that he and his comrades somehow relish in the demise they are chronicling. “It’s tragic!”

What’s more, the people behind themediaisdying most definitely have something to lose if their identities are revealed. “There would be adverse effects if we were to be exposed—and I put that in big quotes. We still have to work with the media.”

You can read the dispatches of Mr. Dying and his crew here and you can follow the Utne Reader Twitter feed here. May our paths never cross.

In the latest issue of This Magazine, Daniel Tseghay provides a roundup of bloggers and citizen journalists who are behind bars or have done time in recent years for what they've written, shown, or refused to disclose. It's no surprise to see bloggers from China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran on the list. But the United States?

"Journalist and video blogger Josh Wolf was imprisoned in 2006 after posting a video on his blog showing an anti-G8 demonstration in San Francisco," writes Tseghay. "Police wanted Wolf’s unedited footage in order to investigate an attempted arson, but he refused to comply and was charged with contempt. It led to Wolf serving about seven and a half months in prison, the longest period any journalist has ever served in the U.S. for refusing to disclose sources."

If you missed the Josh Wolf story the first time around, here's an interview from the the PBS documentary series Frontline.

To read about the much more grave situation for jailed bloggers around the world, read Daniel Tseghay's piece here.

Two and a half years after he co-founded Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, which won last year’s Utne Independent Press Award for best new publication, Kenneth Baer nabbed a job in the new administration. He’s now heading up communications and strategic planning at the Office of Management and Budget, the office President Obama has charged with boosting government transparency.

Baer is leaving Democracy with a supremely talented staff, including Andrei Cherny, the co–founding editor, and E.J. Dionne, Jr., who was named chair of the journal’s editorial committee in December. The new issue takes stock of Obama’s America, with dispatches from Orlando Patterson (on equality), Geoffrey Stone (on liberty), Jedediah Purdy (on community), and others.

Quotation marks aren’t just for quotes. They can also be used to denote “irony,” according to the AP style guide. A prime example comes on the opinion page of today’s Wall Street Journal. When deriding efforts by Congressional Democrats to pass the current stimulus bill, the editors explain, “the ‘stimulus’ claim is based on something called the Keynesian ‘multiplier,’ which is that each $1 of spending the government ‘injects’ into the economy yields 1.5 times that in greater output.”

The quotes around “stimulus,” “multiplier,” and “injects” are meant to cast doubt on the efficacy of the Democratic economic plan. They also give the feeling of superiority over whatever idea the editors are currently deriding. It’s a tactic used often in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, as Jonathan Chait points out in the New Republic. He writes, “The Journal’s fixation with the scare quote is one of the great journalistic marriages between medium and grammatical device.”

The effect of the scare quotes is similar to when cable news channels put a question mark after statements flashed on screen. As Jon Stewart pointed out on the Daily Show (video below), a question mark allows Fox News to say whatever it wants while retaining a thin veil of objectivity. When they broadcast a statement like, “Is the liberal media helping to fuel terror?” They make it seem as though they’re exploring the idea, instead of simply stating it. That’s why Stewart asked, “The question mark: A prophalactic protecting fox news from anything it might contract during its extensive GOP c**ksucking?” He wasn’t making that statement, he was just asking.

Barack Obama has pledged to run an open and transparent administration, rejecting the extreme secrecy that characterized the Bush years. But we shouldn't just take his word for it, warns Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Much has been made of the Obama administration's revamped WhiteHouse.gov website and of their plans to use social networking tools to open the White House up to the people. But a better website than the one Bush oversaw does not a transparent administration make, writes Garber:

And what about the press? Garber notes that Obama’s transparency manifesto, as it’s laid out on his new website, curiously fails to make any mention of journalists. “The goal can’t simply be transparency itself,” writes Garber, “but rather transparency that is processed through a journosphere that is diligent, curious, and skeptical.” So will Obama let reporters in to do the work of informing the people?

If the first few days of his presidency (or most of his campaign, for that matter) are any indication of how things will play out in the years to come, reporters shouldn’t expect plentiful access. Politico reports that the sparring has already begun between the press and White House staff. Tightly restricted access to the President’s oath of office do-over and to his first moments in the Oval Office got the press particularly riled up. Among their complaints: No news photographers were allowed into either of those events. Major wire services responded by refusing to run the pictures “in protest of the White House’s handling of the event,” according to Politico.

The state-run station China Central Television surprised viewers on Inauguration Day by broadcasting President Obama’s speech live and without the usual delay—a cushion for censors to clip offensive words before they go out over the airwaves. Viewers were not surprised, however, when Obama’s use of two sensitive words: “communism” and “dissent” triggered something of a panic among CCTV broadcasters. The Times Online has a play by play:

 “The simultaneous interpreter proceeded smoothly with her translation but her voice faded out with the rest of the President’s sentence. The picture cut from the Capitol to an awkwardly smiling news anchor unprepared for the camera to return to her and apparently awaiting instructions in her earpiece. She turned to a reporter in the studio for comment on Mr Obama’s economic challenges. Yet more confusion as the flustered young woman sought refuge in the notes on her desk. The cutaway seemed to misfire. While many Chinese may not have noticed, the more alert were soon commenting on internet chatrooms.”

Here’s a video of the CCTV cutaway:

China's print media also took liberties with Obama's speech. The People’s Daily completely omitted  an entire sentence of the speech: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.’”

One hopeful note: Times Online correspondent Jane Macartney notes that “China is finding it increasingly difficult to police the internet given its enormous population and a mounting demand for freedom of expression. On one major Chinese language portal, NetEase, a user posted their own translation of the cut sections in English and Chinese. Online comments were often angry. One writer in the eastern city of Qingdao said: 'Why did domestic media produce a castrated version to fool people! Why can’t we see a real world now!'”

Supporters of a free Internet, rejoice. The Federal Communications Commission is about to get a new leader, Julius Genachowski, who is a strong net neutrality advocate. Net neutrality, to the non-geeked-out, is the principle of keeping the Internet’s infrastructure open to all rather than letting big telecomm providers control access and connection speed. It’s a democratic idea that ought to fare well under a Democratic administration and Congress.

The media reform and tech blogospheres are abuzz about Genachowski’s anticipated appointment.

At Personal Democracy, Nancy Scola calls Genachowski “the Tom Hanks of Washington. You can’t mention his name without hearing the phrase ‘great guy, great guy.’” And she points out that Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica dug into Genachowki’s past and didn’t dig up much—but “it’s more than you’ve got on Caroline Kennedy,” he concludes.

Over at Media Citizen, Timothy Karr writes: “Genachowski is one of the principal architects of Obama’s pro-neutrality tech and media platform, which was partially unveiled during a November 2007 event, at which Obama pledged to ‘ensure a free and full exchange of information’ and ‘take a back seat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality.’”

At Public Knowledge, Art Brodsky calls the platform a “forward-looking document that hit all the right notes—a free and open Internet, a central place for technology in government policy, transparency in government.” But Brodsky also points out that “Genachowski’s expected appointment, while significant, is still one-third of the new telecom lineup that includes three new chairmen in the Senate and House.”

Brodsky is referring to Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA), who’s taking over the Senate Commerce Committee; Henry Waxman (D-CA), who will chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee; and Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), who will head the House Communications Subcommittee. All three bodies play key roles in communications policy.

The outgoing FCC chairman, Republican Kevin Martin, has supported some principles of net neutrality. Last August, he teamed with the FCC’s two Democrats, Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, to rule that Comcast was operating its broadband network in a discriminatory way. However, Martin has not provided aggressive leadership in the net neutrality fight—certainly not the type of leadership that is expected from Genachowski, who’s been a high-tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

Writes Brodsky: “There hasn’t been this much high-level interest in technology since the Clinton/Gore years when the White House staff was intimately involved with telecom policy.”

While millions tuned in to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration on TV, a conversation was raging on the microblogging site Twitter. Some expected the site would be overwhelmed by the influx of traffic, but it held up remarkably well, allowing journalists, celebrities, and general netizens to chime in on the day’s proceedings. 

We’ve compiled a few of our favorite insights below. And don’t forget to visit the Utne Reader twitter page while you’re over there.

On the scene:

NewsHour : Sign down on the mall says "We Have Overcome"

anamariecox: People mobbing police officers, desperate for direction. Metaphor? 

PatrickRuffini: Bearded bohemians richly represented

justacoolcat: Big crowd. So when do they release the bulls?

jdickerson: I believe that the Secret Service had to clear Aretha's hat

Media Criticism:

Kaeti: How I wish that Hulu's live coverage wasn't sponsored by Mall Cop.

gmarkham : CBC reporter to kid: "Who's cooler Obama or Kanye West?" WTF? 

Jeffjarvis: If people would stop writing tweets predicting that Twitter will fail, maybe that will lighten the load enough so it doesn't fail.

jdlasica : Now that The Speech is over, telemarketing calls have resumed. God bless America!

jayrosen_nyu: Get ready for four years of "...If you thought the election of Barack Obama was going to bring an end to partisanship, well, think again."

On George W. Bush:

attackerman : GWBush listens to Feinstein's call for 'real and necessary change' like I'M SITTING RIGHT HERE 

hragvartanian : In a perfect world the helicopter Bush is leaving on should drop him off at Gitmo. 

jeffshaw : Bush is being taken to the Hague off-camera right now. Right? 

mollypriesmeyer: Get in your 'copter, crook!

Personal Reflection:

hodgman : As a former woodwinder myself, I am not embarrassed to say: that is one handsome clarinetist. 

msaleem : Obama is already killing my productivity.

JasonBarnett : President Obama's speech was spectacular. Can't wait to read it really really slowly, to infuse each word into my soul.

mfraase : Holy smokes! That was the longest eight years of my life. 

youngamerican : Well, I cried like a fucking baby. 

MCHammer: Pac this is for you....I know how you dreamed of this...I'm throwing a 2 in the air in your memory...love you !! Amen! 

The January issue of Global Journalist includes an “In memoriam” catalog of international journalist deaths in 2008. The remembrances are dry and you can’t help but want more about each of these victims. But there are pictures of the reporters and photographers, now dead, in passport photo booths and more casual enviornments. And there are a few moments of numbing gravity. Photojournalist Eliecer Santamaria was stabbed in his car in Panama while on assignment covering gang warfare. His last words, according to a bystander: “My camera is under the seat…my camera…my camera…”

 To see the photos and learn the stories of these fallen storytellers, visit the Global Journalist website.

A new form of censorship has quietly crept over the internet. Though governments continue to pursue old-school forms of prior restraint, technology is quickly making the blackened-ink style of censorship obsolete. The new ways to restrict free speech don’t require killing information entirely, governments and private companies simply inconvenience and frustrate people away from information they want to keep under wraps.

The internet was meant to foster communication, and it still creates opportunities for vibrant free speech. At the same time, computer science professor Harry Lewis writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education that the internet’s “rapid and ubiquitous adoption has created a flexible and effective mechanism for thought control.” As people increasingly rely on the internet for their news and information, banishing something from the web means effectively striking it from the public consciousness.

Governments have already begun to influence internet usage inside of their countries to enforce social and political norms. Lewis writes that on the internet, there is already “no sex in Saudi Arabia, no Holocaust denials in Australia, no shocking images of war dead in Germany, no insults to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey.”

China sits at the vanguard of this new form of censorship. The country’s famed “Great Firewall” is one of the most advanced information blocking tools in the world. Every savvy netizen, however, knows of proxy servers, encryption services, and other ways to skirt the firewall and find information that China doesn’t want its citizens to see. “The Great Firewall of China isn't impenetrable, “Jacqui Cheng reported for Ars Technica in 2007, “it just takes a little elbow grease and high Internet traffic to squeeze a few banned terms through.” That requirement of elbow grease constitutes the cornerstone of the new censorship.

Governments don’t have to censor all the information that comes into their country anymore, either. Censorship increasingly relies on one information bottleneck: Google. Jeffrey Rosen wrote for the New York Times that Google and its subsidiaries, including YouTube, “arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.” Governments and businesses now realize that banning information from Google means effectively censoring it from a massive audience of people, and they are developing strategies accordingly.

“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” technology expert Tim Wu told the New York Times. After the Turkish government successfully lobbied YouTube to take down videos inside of Turkey that were deemed offensive, the Government tried to ban the videos worldwide to protect Turks living outside the country. These videos would all be available on websites other than YouTube, but with one website eclipsing all others for web videos, really, who would know?

In the United States, copyright laws are often invoked to frighten people into censorship. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that the McCain-Palin campaign, an unlikely advocate for internet freedom, claimed that YouTube “silenced political speech” after it took down campaign ads due to copyright violation claims.

YouTube general council Zahavah Levine responded saying, “YouTube does not possess the requisite information about the content in user-uploaded videos to make a determination as to whether a particular takedown notice includes a valid claim of infringement.” Because of that lack of information, the site often takes down videos first and examines the validity of copyright claims later. By the time videos are restored, especially in a fast-moving political campaign setting, the damage has already been done.

The website Chilling Effects documents many of these cease-and-desist letters in an attempt to combat some of the unnecessary censorship. The site was created in partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a number of universities to help people understand their First Amendment rights and protect legal online speech. But with governments and businesses exchanging and learning from each other’s censorship tactics, the strategies to restrict free speech will likely grow more sophisticated.

Last week, the New York Times announced that it would begin running ads on the front page in response to lagging revenues. A1 purists emitted a chorus of gasps, but pragmatic observers weren't as horrified. After all, plenty of newspapers around the country already print front-page ads; it’s a move that helps them stay afloat in an economy that’s been unkind to print media. James Barron, a contributor to The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages, thinks that changes to a paper's front page offer telling glimpses into larger journalistic trends. He recently talked with On the Media about shifting journalistic practices and 150 years of changes to A1.

Barron has a stockpile of interesting examples. He points to a headline from the assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt:

Maniac in Milwaukee Shoots Colonel Roosevelt. He Ignores Wound, Speaks an Hour, Goes to Hospital.

Besides being incredibly long, it wears its opinions on its sleeve in a way that papers now avoid. It’s difficult to imagine a reporter calling anyone a ‘maniac’ anymore.

Barron also sees the move away from obvious editorializing in the difference between reports of the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations. Lincoln’s death was described as ‘awful news,’ while Kennedy’s was related in more clinical terms.

Check out the interview to hear Barron’s take on other notable changes to the Times’ A1. In particular, there’s an interesting discussion about what an increasing focus on online journalism means for the future of the front page. 

Image courtesy of harshilshah100, licensed under Creative Commons.

Last week, the U.S. Air Force released a “counter-blogging” flow chart, which encourages members to “fix the facts” and “share success” in the comments section of blog posts critical of the U.S. government and the armed forces. The chart also includes “response considerations,” such as disclosing the Air Force connection, citing sources, and “respond(ing) in a tone that reflects highly on the rich heritage of the Air Force.”

In many respects, this move reflects a broader shift in government to embracing new media and the blogging culture that has sprung from it. According to Wired, the Air Force has been the slowest of the military branches to embrace bloggers as a force to contend with; the Army holds “bloggers’ roundtables” with military leaders and civilians and the Navy invited bloggers to accompany personnel on a humanitarian mission.

Ironically, airmen will have little chance to follow these guidelines if on base, because almost every web address including the word “blog” is banned from Air Force networks.

(Thanks, Newshoggers.)

Coverage of the conflict in Israel and Gaza rarely has a nuanced human face. But citizens from both sides of the border are working to change that.

Peace Man and Hope Man, for instance, are friends who maintain a blog about the violence and their daily lives. Peace Man is a Palestinian, living in a refugee camp in Gaza, and Hope Man is an Israeli living in Sderot. Though the two live only about 10 miles from each other, Hope Man, whose real name is Eric Yellin, told NPR’s Melissa Block that they both knew virtually no one across the border before the blog.

“But as soon as I started meeting people,” Yellin said, “it created a real connection and understanding that on the other side of the border, there are people exactly like us who are suffering. We are suffering, too, through this conflict. But the only way to end this was through some kind of connection and dialogue.”

“Gaza Sderot: Life in Spite of Everything” is an online video project similarly aimed at fostering dialogue and understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. For two months, two two-minute videos—one following a resident of Gaza, the other an Israeli from Sderot—were posted to the site every day. The videos depict scenes of everyday life as its lived by normal people.

“When you realize that people have the same issues about work or about love, about raising your kids, in places where you don’t first think in these terms, well then I get the feeling that we’re doing good work. And that happened quite a few times,” the project’s executive producer, Serge Gordey, told The World’s Carol Zall.

These alternative lenses not only initiate dialogue, they effectively communicate the weight of the situation for both sides, a particularly important function given the lack of on-the-ground reporting from Gaza. In a recent post, Hope Man writes, "Many people of our region have left it for good over the years. Bringing up children in such a reality seems almost abusive and certainly irresponsible." Just above that, Peace Man's latest post from Gaza ends with this reflection: "I hope I will have the chance to write you again."

Image by Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, licensed under Creative Commons.

In the history of scandals, Randall “Duke” Cunningham has got to be one of the best. In 2005, the California congressman was found guilty of taking more than $2 million in bribes in a conspiracy allegedly involving defense contractors and prostitutes. The story was broken by reporters from the San Diego Union-Tribune, though none of those reporters are still with the paper, according to the American Journalism Review. 

In fact, reporters who cover the federal government from a local angle—as the ink-stained Pulitzer Prize-winners from the San Diego Union-Tribune were—have largely disappeared from the American media landscape. Newspapers across the country are cutting corners and shrinking budgets, and the Washington correspondents for local papers are a major casualty.

“Nobody else would've gotten Duke Cunningham” says George Condon, the former Washington bureau chief of the Copley News Service, the company that owns the San Diego Union-Tribune. “USA Today, AP, New York Times, none of them would devote resources to a backbench, local San Diego congressman in that kind of detail.”

Many newspapers are trying to cover the federal government remotely, relying more on wire service reports and national news reports. This creates huge gaps in coverage, as the national issues affecting local areas simply aren’t written about. Bill Walsh, a former Washington correspondent for New Orleans' Times-Picayune, says that less information on the national government will lead already cynical Americans to disengage from the civic process. “That hurts democracy,” says Walsh. “And if there are fewer people to report what is really going on, it adds to the cynicism.”

Image by  CJStumpf , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

When driving directions aren’t enough, the website EveryBlock.com is a resource for in-depth information on just about every neighborhood in town. The website has begun compiling news, photos, and hard-to-find municipal information for 11 U.S. cities so far, including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Depending on the cities, visitors can find crime reports, graffiti cleanup requests, and even restaurant inspection information, to find out how many health-code violations the local burger joint has racked up. 

The website, started by former Washingtonpost.com editor Adrian Holovaty, is more aggregation than news and has no editorial voice. Instead, it relies on algorithms to chose the photos and news stories. That lack of personality is the site’s greatest weakness, Rachel Somerstein writes for Next American City. There’s plenty of information on different areas, but the overall personality of the neighborhood doesn’t come through. The site, according to Somerstein, “is kind of like those flowers for sale at the corner deli—beautiful, perhaps, but when you put your nose to petals, there isn’t any smell.”

For improvements, Somerstein suggests looking to WindyCitizen.com, a Chicago-based site with a similar concept that includes more user-suggested news. EveryBlock.com instead is looking more toward becoming a platform for civic activism, where people could petition government agencies using the site.

Image by David Paul Ohmer  , licensed under Creative Commons.

The National Conference of Editorial Writers recently released a list of their most-hated journalistic clichés, the mushy euphemisms and trendy phrases that they think ought to be banned. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch excerpted the survey, along with some of the editorialists’ biting commentary:

• Issues and challenges: “No one has problems any more. We have ‘issues.’ Likewise, we have ‘challenges.’…Why isn’t that a ‘problem’?”
• Faith-based: “Almost 100 percent of the time this phrase is used, the user means ‘religious,’ and they should just suck it up and use the real term.”
• Declined comment: “We’re not inviting people to tea parties here. We’re asking questions....They didn’t ‘decline comment.’ They ‘would not comment.’”
• Closure: “An appalling word that crept out from the woodwork of psychobabble where it squats, poisoning the language, above all in journalism.”

 (Thanks, Get Religion.)

Have you heard much about Iraq lately? Chances are you haven’t: Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review reports that coverage of the Iraq war typically fills less than 2 percent of the news hole. That statistic alone is deplorable, but even worse, according to Garber, is the scarcity of “nuanced treatments of Iraq that would flesh out our simplistic things were bad but they’re getting better narrative into something more substantial and therefore more valuable.”

Garber describes the current attitude of the press toward the war as largely apathetic, and all too willing to report nuggets of conventional wisdom—like "the surge is working"—with little critical analysis.

Whether the quality of Iraq coverage will improve is an open question. The quantity, however, is certain to keep dwindling. ABC, CBS, and NBC have all pulled their full-time correspondents from Iraq, according to the New York Times. CNN’s former Baghdad bureau chief, Jane Arraf, told the Times, “The war has gone on longer than a lot of news organizations’ ability or appetite to cover it.”

How many browser tabs do you have open right now? On most work days, I’m switching between at least eight. According to journalist Maggie Jackson, I’m not alone: Apparently, the average office worker changes tasks every three minutes. Jackson is the author of this year’s Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, and as the title suggests, she’s a bit worried about our tendency to divide our attention. In a recent interview with Columbia Journalism Review, she talks about how this distraction affects our ability to process the news.

Namely, it becomes difficult to fully absorb the news. We only process stories superficially when we try to juggle so many—we fail to “create knowledge out of data.” Jackson marshals plenty of studies to back up her claims, like one that found that people remember 10 percent fewer of a newsperson’s words when there’s a crawl on the TV screen. But she’s at her most compelling when she characterizes the problem and its effects in her own words.

For Jackson, the abundance of news stories is not necessarily the main problem, and neither is the profusion of technologies designed to get us news faster. The issue is the pride we take in our ability to multitask—we’ve “elevated it to a national pastime” and treat it “as a value system.”

The beauty of her analysis is that it allows us some room to change. We can’t really alter the fact that we live in an information economy, but we have some choice in our reactions to it. Jackson notes that researchers are just recently beginning to understand the science of attention, and she’s optimistic that their work will help us find ways to stay focused in a world that promotes distraction.

You can watch more of the interview below. Also check out CJR's feature on journalism and information overload here.

 Image courtesy of Mo Riza, licensed under Creative Commons.

Numerous journalists are joining the ranks of the unemployed. Can the federal government help put them back to work?

In an essay for the New Republic and an interview with On the Media, Mark Pinsky suggests that it can—by reviving the Federal Writers' Project, an initiative established in 1935 under the Works Progress Administration.

Jerrold Hirsch, who wrote a book about the Depression-era project, told On the Media that it enlisted out-of-work writers, journalists, librarians, and others “[t]o rediscover America, to give us a new and broader knowledge of the very country we lived in and not to see it in narrow, exclusive terms of just the dominant culture.” They recorded music, conducted oral histories, collected slave narratives, and worked on creating thorough guides to each state.

Pinsky’s vision for the project's 21st-century sibling isn’t quite as extensive—he described it to OTM’s Brooke Gladstone as the “Federal Writers’ Project Light.” He told her the program would give small grants for “research projects, mostly interviews, that would be approved and put out by community colleges and universities,” and would document important aspects of American life like “the modern immigrant experience” and “the transition to a green economy.” The public benefit, he writes in TNR, would be documentation for the ages of “those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media.”

Everyone makes mistakes, and journalists are no different. Some, however, go beyond the occasional typo and into the truly astounding. The website Regret the Error compiles all the best corrections from journalistic organizations, and every year gives awards for the most notable screw-ups. Among the 2008 winners was this gem from Reuters:

Celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson has apologized after accidentally recommending a potentially deadly plant in organic salads.

Another outstanding contender was this unfortunate mistake from the New York Times:

A picture last Sunday with an essay about a crack house in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, was published in error. The three houses in the picture are on the same street as the crack house, but none of the three figured in the essay.

How embarrassing.

A new Congressional report charges FCC chairman Kevin Martin with “egregious abuses of power” during his nearly four years at the helm. In the 110-page report, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), who helped lead the inquiry into Martin’s leadership style, faults him for the FCC's “dysfunctional” climate.

While it doesn’t appear that Martin broke any rules or laws, the probe levels some damning criticism. As Portfolio observes, he’s accused of manipulating reports that conflicted with his agenda. In one instance, he allegedly altered the conclusions of a report to Congress on à la carte cable pricing; in another, he drew on questionable data to justify increased oversight of the cable industry, and suppressed the study after it was rejected by other FCC commissioners.

Martin is also blamed for fostering an atmosphere of "fear and intimidation" at the Commission. Workers complained of a lack of transparency in decision making, extreme micromanagement, and retaliation for dissent. Last March, some FCC employees wore black in a silent protest against what they viewed as an increasingly bitter, politicized work environment.

Martin is expected the leave the FCC when Obama assumes the presidency, reports Broadcasting & Cable. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), another head to the investigation, says Martin has left the new chairman “a blueprint of what not to do” in the future. Free Press hopes to involve the public in the conversation. They’ve organized a site where you can vote on the issues you’d like to see the Commission tackle, and the organization will present the results to Obama’s FCC transition team in the coming months. Also check out "Big Media Meets Its Match," a 2007 Utne feature on FCC commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, either of whom could be appointed to replace Martin. 

When my mom arrived at work in Chicago on Tuesday morning to news about Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s arrest, she immediately picked up the phone and called her sister in Springfield to gush. Finally! The dirty governor was going down. They crossed their fingers that the story would get national play.

Boy has it ever. A good political scandal doesn’t have to work too hard to capture public attention, and in this case, the connection to president-elect Barack Obama gave Blagojevich’s take-down extra currency.

Not surprisingly, the governor’s attempt to auction off Obama’s Senate seat emerged as the dominant storyline in news about his arrest. What has received less attention is a brewing journalistic scandal in the laundry list of complaints against Blagojevich. For anyone concerned with media ethics, it can’t be overlooked.

Clint Hendler at the Columbia Journalism Review has a nice, detailed account of what we know so far about discussions between Blagojevich’s chief of staff, John Harris, and an unknown “financial advisor” to Chicago Tribune owner Sam Zell. The talks in question involve the governor’s request that the paper fire members of its editorial board and editorial page staff, who have published unflattering pieces about him, in exchange for state aid in selling the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field, which are owned by the Tribune Company.

Charges against the governor disturbingly indicate that the paper was “very sensitive to the message.” As CJR points out, Zell has a lot of questions to answer if he intends to salvage a smidgeon of his fledgling news organization’s reputation. For instance, “Did the financial advisor make the deal that Harris implied he did?” And a couple of months ago, when the paper almost ran a story about the Blagojevich wiretaps, was Zell involved in its decision not to?

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker sums up the disgrace of it all nicely:

Apparently, the caveat that one should never do battle with someone who buys ink by the barrel has been rendered meaningless by “financial advisers” in the Tribune Tower, where Zell's yearlong reign of error is leading one of the nation's greatest newspaper companies to ruin.

Image by theogeo, licensed under Creative Commons.

Searching for an appropriate cover for their recent China-themed issue, the editors of the German MaxPlanckForschung magazine agreed that a Chinese poem would set the right mood. Unfortunately, the Chinese script they chose didn’t quite mean what they thought it meant.

Here’s a translation of the magazine’s cover, according to Language Log:

With high salaries, we have cordially invited for an extended series of matinees
KK and Jiamei as directors, who will personally lead jade-like girls in the spring of youth,
Beauties from the north who have a distinguished air of elegance and allure,
Young housewives having figures that will turn you on;
Their enchanting and coquettish performance will begin within the next few days.

The magazine later apologized to its readers, claiming that a German sinologist had been consulted and had incorrectly signed off on the text before publication. Now the Chinese will have some fodder to fight the always funny Engrish blog, and other jokes about bad Chinese English.

(Thanks, FP Passport.)

A lot of intelligent women find themselves torn between dismantling the superficiality of “women's interest” magazines and buying into it. Wendy Felton is one of those women, and she uses her three-year-old Glossed Over blog to rant, rave, and dissect fashion spreads and stories from publications like Cosmopolitan and Glamour.

Felton doesn’t claim to be an expert (she’s a freelance writer and editor), but simply a fan of women’s magazines who is continually disappointed by their contradictory messages and incongruous advice. So why does she bother reading them? It’s a guilty pleasure “that lets me get juiced up on righteous outrage while simultaneously allowing me to ogle lip gloss and shoes.” The right mix of cynicism (one post is titled “Marie Claire editors were the girls I hated in high school”) and acknowledged shallowness makes her commentary, at once funny and incisive, relatable to a broad (if mostly female) audience.

Image courtesy of evans.photo, licensed under Creative Commons.

Beginning in 2009, the Pulitzer Prizes in journalism will accept submissions from web-only publications that “adhere to the highest journalistic principles” and are “primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories.” (As the New York Observer put it: “Translation: No lowly bloggers allowed!”)

This is good news for the pack of online news outlets that turned out stellar coverage this year—web-only news machines like MinnPost, ProPublica, Voice of San Diego, and the Center for Independent Media sites can seek old-media recognition for their vital pre- and post-election reporting, and for the local stories they’ve stayed on as print newsrooms hemorrhaged staff and resources.

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

When photographer Jill Greenberg’s editors at the Atlantic asked her to photograph John McCain for the magazine's October issue, she swallowed her distaste and delivered the benevolent-looking images they sought. But she couldn’t cast her disgust aside, so she snapped a second set of photos that better captured her own feelings for McCain. Compared to the warm, well-lit portraits that ended up in the magazine, her alternative shots make McCain look...well...kind of evil. Greenberg posted the photos to her website, and remained unapologetic when her editors freaked out.

Were her actions ethical? A recent episode of On the Media chats with Greenberg and other photographers about the often murky question of integrity in photojournalism. Greenberg suggests that in some situations, the most ethical way to portray her subjects may not always be the most flattering. Photographer Platon, who captured Ann Coulter on the cover of Time looking, in interviewer Bob Garfield’s estimation, "like a blond praying mantis," agrees. For him, a photographer’s duty isn’t to represent subjects as they’d prefer, but to interpret them, to “pull people out of their reality and into our reality.” Greenberg further justifies unflattering photos (perhaps less convincingly) with the contention that editors sometimes demand them, even asking photographers to deliberately mislead their subjects.

You can take a look at the photos in question, along with some other great (and potentially questionable) shots in a slideshow accompanying the episode transcript.

A few weeks ago the European Commission launched Europeana, an online multimedia project that aims to make Europe's scientific and cultural heritage universally accessible. Enthusiasm for the project is so high that within hours of Europeana's official Nov. 20 launch, millions of hits reduced the site's speed to a crawl, forcing administrators to shut it down temporarily. The developers plan to have a sturdier version up by mid-December.

The site, which has been in the works since 2005, boasts “more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings and films from national libraries and cultural institutions of the European Union's 27 Member States.” If it exists in a digital format, whether it’s a book from Hungary or a painting from the Louvre, it will be on Europeana and available in every language of the EU.

And this is only the beginning. For the next three years, the website and related projects will receive millions of euros in funding from the EU to expand the collection and create interactive space for users with specific interests.

(Thanks, EuropeanVoice.)

The Obama administration’s transition website, Change.gov, is no longer locked down under a traditional copyright. Yesterday, the website announced that all its content would be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. This means that all content would be free to share and remix, so long as it’s accompanied by the proper attribution.

Regular readers of Utne.com know that many of the images on the site are licensed under Creative Commons. Law and technology expert Lawrence Lessig, a Creative Commons founder, called the Obama team’s move “great news” saying it’s “consistent with the values of any ‘open government.’”

Well-written literary sex can advance a plot, reveal fascinating character traits, and add immensely to a novel. A badly written sex scene, on the other hand, is just pornographic. The Literary Review just released their nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, including scenes from Brida by Paulo Coelho and The Reserve by Russell Banks. The awards are designed to “discourage, poorly written, redundant or excessively pornographic passages of a sexual nature in fiction,” and should come with a “not appropriate for children” warning. 

On the other end of the spectrum, the Book Design Review blog just released its list of its favorite book covers from 2008. The simplicity of Jennifer Carrow’s cover for Against Happiness, book by Eric G. Wilson, makes it my favorite of the bunch.

(Thanks, Kottke and Coudal.)

If you were being paid big, undisclosed bucks by companies directly affected by the issues you commented on as a media personality, would that constitute a conflict of interest? Conventional wisdom says: Of course! But two men recently exposed by the New York Times for being in exactly that situation say: Well, not really.

The supremely well-reported cover story of Sunday's Times was an in-depth report on retired General Barry McCaffrey. McCaffrey is an NBC military analyst touted by the network as an independent expert, a characterization the Times calls into question by revealing his tangled web of undisclosed business ties to defense contractors. The story describes McCaffrey as a member of "an exclusive club" that "has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce." They operate in a "deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest."

Another story, published in late November, put Dr. Frederick Goodwin, host of the public radio health show The Infinite Mind, under the microscope. Here’s an example of Goodwin’s questionable ethical judgments, from the Times’ story:

… In a program broadcast on Sept. 20, 2005, he warned that children with bipolar disorder who were left untreated could suffer brain damage, a controversial view.

“But as we’ll be hearing today,” Dr. Goodwin told his audience, “modern treatments—mood stabilizers in particular—have been proven both safe and effective in bipolar children.”

That same day, GlaxoSmithKline paid Dr. Goodwin $2,500 to give a promotional lecture for its mood stabilizer drug, Lamictal, at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla. In all, GlaxoSmithKline paid him more than $329,000 that year for promoting Lamictal, records given to Congressional investigators show.

So, Dr. Goodwin, how exactly does that not constitute a conflict of interest? Goodwin conceded that, in that instance, he probably should have disclosed his relationship with GlaxoSmithKline. But he also told the Times that since he consults for lots of drug companies, he has no bias toward any one in particular. "These companies compete with each other and cancel each other out," he told the paper.

McCaffrey, too, has spoken up in his own defense, noting that his vocal criticism of Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t “the stuff of someone ‘shilling’ for the Pentagon.” Glenn Greenwald finds this reasoning unconvincing:

Both NBC and McCaffrey are either incapable of understanding, or are deliberately ignoring, the central point: In those instances where McCaffrey criticized Rumsfeld for his war strategy, it was to criticize him for spending insufficient amounts of money on the war, or for refusing to pursue strategies that would have directly benefited the numerous companies with which McCaffrey is associated. 

Now that the election is over, the great scapegoat of ’08, Bill Ayers, has emerged from hiding to embark upon a grand media tour. He made his post-campaign coming-out on Good Morning America, gave speeches in Washington that drew ample coverage in the mainstream press, and has been popping up in countless other news outlets, including Democracy Now! and Salon.

The substance of the Ayers coverage may not warrant the amount of time it consumes. But if there's one Ayers interview actually worth paying attention to, it's the one he gave to Fresh Air host Terry Gross on November 18, according to James Fallows. Fallows says Gross’ interview with Ayers exemplifies how good she is at her job—and how bad so many other professional interviewers are at theirs. Here’s why he thinks Gross is so great:

…[W]hat she shows brilliantly in this interview, is: she listens, and she thinks. In my experience, 99% of the difference between a good interviewer (or a good panel moderator) and a bad one lies in what that person is doing while the interviewee talks. If the interviewer is mainly using that time to move down to the next item on the question list, the result will be terrible. But if the interviewer is listening, then he or she is in position to pick up leads ("Now, that's an intriguing idea, tell us more about..."), to look for interesting tensions ("You used to say X, but now it sounds like..."), to sum up and give shape to what the subject has said ("It sounds as if you're suggesting..."). And, having paid the interviewee the respect of actually listening to the comments, the interviewer is also positioned to ask truly tough questions without having to bluster or insult.

If you have this standard in mind—is the interviewer really listening? and thinking?—you will be shocked to see how rarely broadcast and on-stage figures do very much of either. But listen to this session by Gross to see how the thing should be done.

Image by BlogjamComic, licensed under Creative Commons.

For the past five years, the Center for Media and Democracy has singled out the PR hacks most deserving of negative attention, handing out Falsies Awards each year to those guilty of “polluting our information environment” with spin, subversion, and downright dishonesty.

This year’s nominees include Mail Moves America, which insists that junk mail is actually important communication, to “Clean Coal” campaigns from Americans for Balanced Energy Choices. (Both are front groups funded by advertisers and coal producers, respectively). There’s also an opportunity for write-ins if you think a particularly deserving person or organization is missing from the list.

In addition to pinpointing these media evils, the Falsies committee gives out the “Win Against Spin” award to honor those who have been a sharp knife of truth cutting through the B.S.

Voting ends December 1, so cast your ballot and give these nefarious nominees what they deserve!

Image courtesy of the Center for Media and Democracy.

When Michael Minelli found out that he was featured in the book Hot Chicks with Douchebags, he didn’t take the insult lying down. According to court documents obtained by the Smoking Gun, the 27-year-old club promoter alleges that statements made about him in the book are “false, harmful and vulgar,” and is he suing the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, for libel.

The book, which was derived from the website HotChicksWithDouchebags.com, states that Minelli’s “popped-collar, spikey-haired presence was so far beyond regular douche, so far beyond uberdouche, he could spontaneously create a new element on the periodic tables—Douche Nine.” As a result of the book, Minelli “has been and continues to be the subject of ridicule in that he has been, is now, and continues to be called a Douchebag by friends, acquaintances, coworkers, employers, and strangers alike,” according to the complaint. Now, the onus may be on Minelli’s lawyers to prove that he is not, in fact, a douchebag.

“Overload!”, the Columbia Journalism Review’s current cover story, is every bit as overwhelming as its subject.

In a lengthy, thorough explication, Bree Nordenson lays out the results of a study commissioned by the Associated Press to track the news consumption of young adults around the world. The gist of the findings is grim, but hardly surprising: There’s more information out there than ever before, and this is not a good thing. “The American public is no better informed now than it has been during less information-rich times,” Nordenson writes.

Or, in numerical terms: “Two hundred and ten billion e-mails are sent each day. Say goodbye to the gigabyte and hello to the exabyte, five of which are worth 37,000 Libraries of Congress. In 2006 alone, the world produced 161 exabytes of digital data, the equivalent of three million times the information contained in all the books ever written.”

The way information, particularly news, is disseminated has been revolutionized, for better and worse, by the internet. Context has disappeared; data usually travels in a chaotic tsunami and arrives “unbundled” and often indecipherable. “These days, news comes at us in a flood of unrelated snippets,” Nordenson writes.

The rest of the article examines a number of different trends affecting the current state of news consumption: the limits of human attention, the role of media in democracy, and the new role of journalism. The piece does end on a relatively optimistic note, however; the final section, titled “Why Journalism Won’t Disappear,” contains this easier-said-than-done prescription: "If news organizations decide to rethink their role and give consumers the context and coherence they want and need in an age of overload, they may just achieve the financial stability they’ve been scrambling for, even as they recapture their public-service mission before it slips away." 

After a recent, tenuous cease-fire was broken, fighting between the Congolese army and a rebel minority has resumed with intensity. The violence has garnered a fair amount of attention from the mainstream media, but how long will that coverage last?

Probably not long considering that foreign affairs, especially those not directly related to the United States, make up only a fraction of what Americans read, see, and hear: 8 percent of network news, 13 percent of newspaper coverage, 4 percent of cable news. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting pleads with its readers to stay interested in the issue, as continued attention will encourage editors to offer more extensive coverage.

But if and when the conflict fades from America's consciousness, here are some sites from around the world with thoughtful reports on the situation and its implications:

OneWorld.net focuses particularly on the human rights aspect of the conflict.

EuropeanVoice has several articles and opinion pieces, like this column: a call to arms, both literally and figuratively, for the UN (registration required). 

Al-Jazeera presents both news and multimedia features.

All Africa.com is a one-stop resource for African news and perspectives from around the continent.

Der Spiegel’s international edition not only presents information and opinion, but has also managed to snag an interview with a Congolese rebel.

UPDATE (11/17/2008): Ushahidi, an African citizen-reporting platform, has launched an interactive map monitoring the DRC conflict.

Image by hdptcar, licensed under Creative Commons.

The new website Spot.us is experimenting with an innovative business model for freelance journalists. The idea is simple: Journalists pitch stories to the site’s community, and if people like an idea they can contribute money to make the reporting possible. Users are also able to submit news tips that freelancers can pick up on and craft into pitches that they will seek funding for through the site.

Tips submitted so far include queries like “Why are San Francisco city streets in such poor condition?” and “What's the future of Bay Area newspapers given the changing economy?” Stories soliciting funding include a three-part series on cities working to become more accommodating to the elderly, and a report on how the financial crisis is impacting small businesses in San Francisco. One writer's pitch—"How safe are San Francisco bay beaches and water a year after the Cosco Busan oil spill?"—has raised $360 from 16 donors (if he raises $440 more, he'll write a 1,000-word story on the subject).

Blogger Ana Marie Cox tested a similar business model when the magazine paying her travel expenses to cover John McCain’s campaign went under before the end of election season. She asked her readers to pony up to keep her on the trail, offering various thank-you gifts in return (and ongoing coverage, of course). When she appeared on WNYC’s On the Media on October 31, she had raised over $8,000.

(Thanks, Columbia Journalism Review.)

When television broadcasting goes all-digital in February, a range of old TV frequencies known as “white space” will be up for grabs, and technology pioneers like Google’s Larry Page have been lobbying the FCC to dedicate that spectrum to free internet and other public communication.

But the National Association of Broadcasters, mobile phone companies, and other entities who stand to profit from private, pay-based communication have been fighting white space liberation.

Until last week, that is, when the FCC ruled to open white space to unlicensed use (pdf), scoring a huge victory for Page’s camp. This essentially means that online communication will be faster and available to more people, especially rural and low-income users. It will also likely result in cheaper offerings from internet, cable, and cell phone service providers as competition in those markets intensifies.

Jeff Jarvis outlines these and other benefits of public white space at his blog BuzzMachine. (“Note this historic moment,” he writes. “I’m praising the FCC.”) He argues that the internet is no longer a merely a privilege, but a right: “Access to the internet—and open, broadband internet that is neither censored nor filtered by government or business—should be seen, similarly, as a necessity and thus a right. Just as we judge nations by their literacy, we should now judge them by their connectedness.”

Jarvis also does a good job of explaining white space and its benefits in non-wonky terms, focusing on the ways it will benefit education, government, and society at large.

Image courtesy of rvaphotodude, licensed by Creative Commons.

For months the election has dominated the media landscape and much of people’s free time. Conversation topics haven’t been a problem: Whenever you needed something to talk about, the election was always there. News outlets have known this day was coming for some time, as Cally Carswell wrote in this post. Now that the campaigns is over, however, many are still scrambling to reposition themselves for the post-election world.

The Huffington Post, for example, is trying to capitalize on more local content. The site recently launched a page specifically for Chicago and plans one dedicated to San Francisco, according Russell Adams and Shira Ovide of the Wall Street Journal. The site is also trying to move more toward more non-political, lifestyle content, Adams and Ovide report. Huffington Post representatives offered free massages and facials at the Democratic National Convention in an attempt to brand their new, post-election identity.

Even with the new efforts, some on the Huffington Post site are already waxing nostalgic over the past few years. The website’s comedy-based companion 236.com recently belied the rebranding in an item headlined, “We Can't Quit W. Countdown- 50 Reasons We're Sorry to See President Bush Go.” Reason #1, “We'll never be able to get 250,000 Google search results by typing in the words ‘Obama drunk at a wedding.’”

Some websites, including FiveThirtyEight.com and Talking Points Memo, aren't turning away from their political bread and butter. Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo recently wrote that the website’s evolution has "always been bound up with my stance as a voice of opposition to the Bush administration.” With the Bush’s tenure quickly ending, Talking Points Memo is doubling down, hiring two new reporter-bloggers to cover the Democratic Congress and White House.

The problem, Adams and Ovide write, is that “news outlets that benefit significantly from an election suffer about the same amount when it's over, so the Web sites will expand now at their peril.” Talking Points Memo seems to be an exception to that rule, considering that the site began during the 2000 recount and expanded after the 2004 and 2006 elections.

Even without the election coverage, there’s still plenty of inane and amusing content to be found on the web, Farhad Manjoo writes for Slate. Sure, people can’t refresh Pollster.com and FiveThirtyEight.com every few minutes for new polling results, but there are plenty of immature jokes on College Humor and addictive games including Desktop Tower Defense to distract people while they’re supposed to be working.

I would hasten to add that Utne.com would give a bit more substance to your web searching than Desktop Tower Defense.

Conversation topics, however, are more difficult. The Onion satirically reported that the election has left Obama supporters with “the cold realization that they have nothing to fill their pathetically empty lives.” You can watch a video of that below.

Image by  NathanF , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Newspapers from across the nation and the world scrambled last night to capture Barack Obama’s historic victory in a few pithy words.

Here’s a domestic sampling from the Columbia Journalism Review’s Campaign Desk.

And the Newseum has headlines from around the United States, from the Chicago Tribune to the Huntsville Times in Alabama (see above). The site also features front pages from the rest of the world, though many international newspapers are still a news cycle behind.

The seldom-reliable but often-entrancing microblogging site Twitter has a new page dedicated to reports from voters. Twitter users around the country are sending in reports of how long they’ve had to wait in line, voting irregularities, and any inane observations that come of the top of their heads. The site is designed to give constant updates for voters, advocacy groups, and journalists. It also runs the danger of driving people insane with the flood of information. Current TV has partnered with Twitter and is featuring this video about the site.

For some on-site coverage tonight, be sure to check in with Utne Reader’s Twitter page, as Cally Carswell sends updates from Obama’s rally in Chicago.

Utne Reader editor in chief David Schimke recently spoke up for the alt press at the Dole Institute of Politics, which has hosted a series of election-related panels this year. Schimke was part of the institute’s latest lively panel, “Media Coverage of Campaign 2008: Magic or Misguided?” Check out video from the media panel here, and browse other Dole Institute videos here.

After reporting significant losses in addition to rising production costs, the Christian Science Monitor has turned to a solution that it hopes will minimize losses while maintaining or even increasing readership. The newspaper’s daily content will soon be entirely web-based, with a print edition (photo features, in-depth reportage) coming out weekly. Along with the change comes a steep drop in subscription prices, from $220/year to $89/year. However, this doesn’t mean that the CSM is completely dodging the bullet: Editor John Yemma still plans to cut 10-15 percent of staff next year.

The Monitor’s transition appears to be relatively painless, but the Columbia Journalism Review warns that the strategy may not work for all troubled publications. One of the biggest variables in the plan’s success is ad revenue: Print advertisers may not want to make the switch, especially since the print edition of the Monitor skews to an older demographic than its online content. It’s also difficult to predict if subscribers who aren’t tech-savvy will adapt or simply give up. The evolution is slated for April 2009.

Unlike most of the electorate, some political reporters are not eager to wake up on November 5 with the longest campaign in history a good night’s sleep behind them. “It's kind of like, this is who I am now,” Andrew Romano, a Newsweek blogger, tells the New Republic. “[S]o the idea of the campaign being over and not doing a politics blog is a little bit like, who am I after this election?”

Politico’s Ben Smith shares Romano’s sentiments. “It's so built into my system, that it's going to be hard to stop,” he tells TNR. “It's really pathological.”

But the tight psychological grip campaigns hold on reporters won’t be missed by all those covering the political beat. After the last presidential campaign, CNN correspondent Candy Crowley tells TNR it took her “a good month to stop waking up in the middle of the night in a panic that I've missed something.” Matt Bai of the New York Times notes that some reporters have been on the trail for nearly a year: “There are guys who went out to the primaries in November, December, and thought they'd be done in February or March, and they just never came home.”

Reporter weariness recently caught the critical eye of the Columbia Journalism Review, who took the New York Times to task for what they deemed an instance of lazy campaign coverage. Questioning the relevance of a Times cover story, CJR warns reporters not to “take out their election fatigue on voters.” Just pen a few more good stories, guys, then you can come home and sleep. . .or just keep blogging.

The field of institutions and public figures endorsing Barack Obama is getting really crowded, and it’s a motley assortment. Some fairly unlikely personalities are in the tank, including Christopher Buckley, Christopher Hitchens and Colin Powell, as well as conservative publications like the Record.

Spend a few minutes perusing the Wikipedia page listing Obama’s endorsements, and you might visualize a rowdy cocktail party whose guest list includes editors from nearly every major U.S. newspaper (including the Chicago Tribune, marking its first endorsement of a Democratic presidential candidate in its 161-year history); hundreds of current and former governors, mayors, and legislators; CEOs, actors, rock stars, and authors; and even the plumbers’ union (presumably Joe the Plumber was not consulted since, well, he’s not a plumber).

The New Yorker provided a characteristically thorough endorsement of Obama. The New York Times argues for the relevance of newspaper endorsements. And there’s a nifty map illustrating the distribution of this year’s newspaper endorsements and comparing it with 2004’s. 

Several cast members of HBO's The Wire are stumping for Obama. (Gbenga Akinnagbe, if he’s half as terrifying as the drug lieutenant he played on the series, will make a very compelling canvasser). An absolutely fabulous coterie of fashion designers has pledged allegiance. And ostensibly apolitical publications have weighed in, most recently the science magazine Seed.

Leading the ironic-endorsement pack is onetime McCain campaign advisor Charles Fried, whose decision to back Obama is partially due to McCain’s “choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis” (via Talking Points Memo).

All of which begs the question: Who’s in poor old John McCain’s corner? The list of newspapers endorsing him is considerably shorter than Obama’s. There’s Steve Forbes, of course. And then there’s the small faction of Hollywood conservatives (say it ain’t so, Gary Sinise!).

Image courtesy of Philip (Flip) Kromer, licensed under Creative Commons.

The always-thorough folks at FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) have compiled the “Top Troubling Tropes of Campaign ’08,” a handy (if alarming) roundup of eleven misleading, factually bankrupt themes that have dominated election coverage.

Not only do journalists organize the election story around the question—not terribly helpful to voters—of who's up and who's down, they largely base their evaluation of the race on shallow image-based narratives that the media construct themselves: Barack Obama is an "elitist" who might not "get the way we live" ( Extra! , 8/08), while John McCain is a straight-talking "maverick" ( Extra! , 6/08).  

The FAIR report goes well beyond deconstructing the “maverick” and “elitist” labels (Troubling Tropes #1 and 2), using extensively sourced analysis to rebut the claim that the so-called liberal media has “smeared” vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin (#3) and contesting the media’s treatment of John McCain as a “national security pro” (#4).

Then there’s “false balance” (#8), in which the media’s fact-checking is doled out “equally”—you know, debunk an Obama claim, then one of McCain's, then back to Obama, and so on.

In recent elections, media "fact-check" reporting often bends over backwards to choose an equal number of falsehoods or distortions from each side—which can give voters a misleading impression of the prevalence of political lying when one side is obviously more guilt of exaggerations.

In this election, it is beyond question that that the McCain/Palin campaign has been more aggressively lying in its campaign ads and rhetoric than the Obama/Biden camp. Nonetheless, the overriding media tendency is to blunt that disparity and see the campaign as a series of back-and-forth attacks. . . .

Read the full report at FAIR’s website.

Native communities currently broadcast on 33 U.S. radio stations, a number that may double within the next couple of years, reports Mike Janssen for In These Times. Tribal communities applied for 51 radio stations last year, and 12 FCC approvals have trickled in thus far. These soon-to-be stations aren’t on the air yet—they’re still in the fundraising and planning stages—but they could play a significant role in strengthening Native communities. Janssen writes:

Many noncommercial stations around the country focus on community issues. This is especially true of Native stations, which cover topics such as health, education and the environment; feature locally programmed music; and broadcast in Native languages that in some places are spoken by very few people.

Several applicants are still waiting to hear back from the FCC. In the meantime, the nonprofit Native Public Media has a short list of Native stations that stream online and a directory of the stations currently broadcasting.

Government agencies are hopping on the Twitter bandwagon, with mostly good results, reports Silicon Alley Insider. Followers of the State Department receive updated travel alerts and country information, the FDA tweets about food safety news, and the U.S. Geological Survey posts a surprising amount of useful links, about rocks (naturally) but also about topics like alternative energy, natural resources, and the environment.

Of course, not all of the newly Twittering agencies are making the most of microblogging. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, tends to post—and infrequently, at that—about the country’s much-mocked color-coded threat level. The intentions are good, perhaps, but the information is hardly crucial to most people.

On the whole, it’s great to see the government going with the instant-information flow by using this service. Most people can appreciate getting condensed versions of pertinent news without having to navigate the overcrowded, out-of-date messes that are many government websites.

(Thanks, World Hum)

Image courtesy of trekkyandy, licensed under Creative Commons.

Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank continues to supply noteworthy information from the campaign trail about Sarah Palin’s evolving relationship with the press. This troubling bit of news comes from a live chat Milbank hosted with readers:

…I have to say the Secret Service is in dangerous territory here. In cooperation with the Palin campaign, they've started preventing reporters from leaving the press section to interview people in the crowd. This is a serious violation of their duty—protecting the protectee—and gets into assisting with the political aspirations of the candidate. It also often makes it impossible for reporters to get into the crowd to question the people who say vulgar things. So they prevent reporters from getting near the people doing the shouting, then claim it's unfounded because the reporters can't get close enough to identify the person.

At Political Animal, Steve Benen asks the natural follow-up question: “Why on earth would an independent journalist play along with these ridiculous rules?”

Dana?

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Image by alex-s, licensed under Creative Commons.

When Christopher Buckley endorsed Barack Obama in a column for The Daily Beast last week, news traveled fast. As he accurately predicted, “the headline will be: ‘William F. Buckley’s Son Says He is Pro-Obama.’” It reads a bit more anti-McCain than it does pro-Obama, but it is an interesting piece from a longtime McCain friend and supporter.

This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once–first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

Buckley opted not to air his opinions in his back-page column for the National Review, the conservative magazine his father founded in 1955; he took them to The Daily Beast instead, hoping to avoid the deluge of “foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails” that his fellow National Review columnist Kathleen Parker received when she criticized Sarah Palin (including one that, according to Buckley, "suggested that Kathleen's mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster").

It didn’t save his job, though. Just four days after the Obama endorsement, he was back at The Daily Beast to report that, in response to his own deluge of hate-email from National Review readers, he’d offered his resignation. “This offer was accepted—rather briskly!—by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler.” (Lowry claims that the National Review only received about 100 emails regarding Buckley’s endorsement—“a tiny amount compared to our usual volume.”)

So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

Imagine if your TV could see you sitting on your couch knitting, or doing a crossword puzzle, or drinking heavily, and tailor its commercials specifically to those activities, in real time.

That’s pretty much what MySpace is helping its advertisers accomplish with increasing precision, ReadWriteWeb reports. By employing “hypertargeting”—the meticulous manipulation of advertising based on individual users’ stated interests—online advertisers make old models of demographic targeting seem haphazard and inefficient.

Because MySpace users can edit their profiles in extremely granular ways—specifying everything from their age to their weight, level of education, and whether they want children—advertisers can fine-tune their messages accordingly. What’s most ingenious about this tactic (or alarming, depending on your point of view) is that MySpace allows users to list activities like “drinking” and “partying” as favorites, giving notoriously effective liquor advertisements a direct conduit into their hypertargeted audience.

Film critics are grumbling about Disney’s decision to use blogger comments—rather than official reviews—in ads for its latest film, the UK release The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The studio lifted online plaudits like "Simply stunning" from IMDb.com, reports Telegraph, in a move that some professional critics view as a preemptive strike by the studio's marketing department, which may have feared negative reviews and decided to use existing blogger praise for blurbs instead. Then there's the question of accountability: Who’s to say that the quoted praise, which is all but anonymous when submitted by Theedge-4 or Pete63, wasn’t written by a producer or actor from the film?

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine ridicules the controversy: “How dare a movie studio quote the people who actually buy the tickets and watch the movies? How dare they give respect to the audience?” It’s difficult to say how much influence these blurbs have over potential moviegoers, but those who oppose Disney's decision have common sense on their side. The average person is probably more inclined to believe a full review from an established voice like the New York Times’ A.O. Scott than a sound-bite accolade from an unknown entity like the Disney-quoted blogger Mjavfc1.

Image by casalingarevival, licensed under Creative Commons.

Some nasty sound bites have emerged from McCain-Palin rallies recently. Rally-goers have called Barack Obama a “terrorist,” and one even shouted “Kill him!” But Obama hasn’t been the only object of their fury. The media, too, is taking extreme heat from GOP party faithful. A dispatch from a Palin rally in Florida by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank tells a disturbing story:

. . . Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

It seems the McCain-Palin media wars have reached a new climax, with the ticket's supporters somehow convinced that scrutiny of the candidates is something to get angry about. After all the name-calling, Milbank found a creative way to make himself feel better: He stood outside a rally wearing a sign around his neck reading “mainstream media,” and holding another in his hand saying “I need a hug.” He did get a few hugs, but was also told, “You put your hands on me, you’ll spit your teeth out,” and, “You’ll get a hug if you report accurately, which you don’t.”

While not focused on the scorn being directed at the media, the overall ugly turn of McCain-Palin rallies has become a big story in the news, and one the Democrats are pushing, according to Politico. But Jane Kim, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, says the rally story is being told at the expense of issue-based news—namely, John McCain's new mortgage proposal:

While the increasingly dirty language evident at these rallies should certainly be covered in stride, and while Bill Ayers deserves independent inquiry, any report from the trail should remember that McCain did present a new idea that is supposed to help troubled homeowners, and assess his speeches with that in mind. If he’s talking about the plan in between the “Who is Senator Obama?” lines, it deserves mention. If he’s not, that deserves mention as well.

Image by Matthew Reichbach, licensed under Creative Commons.   

Utne’s own Julie Hanus recently reported on some promising and ingenious ways in which the fair use doctrine is thriving, but technicalities are still tripping up artists who should be protected by fair use.

Producers of the intelligent-design documentary Expelled have been exonerated in court after Yoko Ono and EMI Records sued the filmmakers for including a 15-second clip of John Lennon’s “Imagine”—but not without some difficulty. The film was released on DVD without the clip while the case was pending, which, Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at the Industry Standard argues, is an unfortunate side effect of what should have been an open-and-shut case. What’s more, she points out, fair use might not be enough to protect those who can’t afford to defend themselves in court: “If a film with Hollywood producers has trouble using media clips, what hope does an average citizen have of using something without worrying about huge legal expenses that could result?”

But Anthony Falzone, blogging for Stanford Law’s Center for Internet and Society, hails the case as a victory for fair use, in part due to the efforts of Media/Professional Insurance to cover the legal expenses of Expelled’s producers and others sued in fair use cases.

At Slashdot, Ian Lamont reaches the same conclusion I did: It’s a bit ironic that the song sparking the lawsuit is Lennon’s utopian manifesto “Imagine.”

Image by orsorama, licensed under Creative Commons.