Accept no substitutes

Month: January 2005 (Page 4 of 4)

NYTimes to charge (like Salon or Wall St J)?

Dan Gillmor noticed a Reuters report, picking up on the Business Week cover story mentioned here earlier today, saying that the NYTimes might be, may be, maybe, charging their 18.5 million unique monthly Internet users.
Dan asks: Would you pay?
I already pay for the paper edition. Doing that is much cheaper than owning three computers which is how many we’d need so we could all read our favorite sections each morning — and the online version doesn’t give the crossword or free anyway!
And yes I do pay for Salon, but not for WSJ.

Payola News and Commentary

Just as record companies are attempting once again to kill off the payola/indpendent promoter system, the same persistant virus has been revealed to be hitting the news and commentary side of the media.

Rightwing spokesman, Armstrong Williams, has been shown to have been paid $240,000 by the US Department of Education [conservatives note this is your tax money too] to shill for No Child Left Behind. (see USA Today’s story).

The contract, detailed in documents obtained by USA TODAY through a Freedom of Information Act request, also shows that the Education Department, through the Ketchum public relations firm, arranged with Williams to use contacts with America’s Black Forum, a group of black broadcast journalists, “to encourage the producers to periodically address” NCLB. He persuaded radio and TV personality Steve Harvey to invite Paige onto his show twice. Harvey’s manager, Rushion McDonald, confirmed the appearances.

Williams says he was a strong believer in the NCLB to begin with, but that didn’t stop him for entering into a contract which seriously compromised his integrity. I am now glad to say that a full course in ethics is required at UNC’s Journalism School. I hope that Williams and others will take time to check out the classes and take a similar course themselves.

But Williams is only half the equation. Departments of government do have a duty to educate about their work but this project executed with too much secrecy became propaganda — not openness.

As USA Today reports:

Williams’ contract was part of a $1 million deal with Ketchum that produced “video news releases” designed to look like news reports. The Bush administration used similar releases last year to promote its Medicare prescription drug plan, prompting a scolding from the Government Accountability Office, which called them an illegal use of taxpayers’ dollars.

This is the kind of thing that was corrupting the music industry and should not be coming from government. The Clinton Administration was not immune from this kind of behavior as local reporter Fiona Morgan told us in Salon in January 2000.


Editor and Publisher reports that the Tribune Media Services is also questioning the columns that Williams wrote for their syndicate.
Four of his Right Side columns were in favor of NCLB.

Ambiguity of AuthImage

The good news is that since I installed AuthImage for comments I’m no longer spending as much time deleting Texas Hold’em comment spam than I spend writing articles.

The bad news is that AuthImage is sometimes a bit of a strong gatekeeper not allowing posts for perfectly wonderful people who can read and type the code just right. It seems that once AuthImage decides you are not authorized you are in comment limbo for a while. There is nothing that I can see in the code that would cause this issuing of small exiles to commenters; I’ve been sent into comment exile myself.

If you want to comment and AuthImage decides that you can’t, just drop me a note with your comment and I’ll make sure your comment gets added sooner or later. Send to jones@unc.edu or hit me with IM as smalljones.

UPDATE I suspect that AuthImage is not happy about being in a web-server-cluster environment. If so that would explain a lot.

Times of Trouble

Collegue and ever alert observer, Phil Meyer, writes to say that the New York Times and its future arethe cover story on the current Business Week. Further, the future is red but not rosy. Not all of the Times’ troubles are tied to their mismanagement and missing oversight of reporters like the infamous Jason Blair. Many are the problems of a paper-based information source trying to make the move to the Internet. More people read the NYTimes than ever and more of us read it on the Net (disclosure: I get the paper edition too, but end up reading a good bit of the paper on the Net anyhow). The question is as always: Where is the Money? This is no small question since good journalism requires good money — unless you are me blogging in the public interest :->

The B-Week article ends:

The New York Times, like all print publications, faces a quandary. A majority of the paper’s readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering. “The business model that seems to justify the expense of producing quality journalism is the one that isn’t growing, and the one that is growing — the Internet — isn’t producing enough revenue to produce journalism of the same quality,” says John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired and other magazines and Web sites.

Today, Sulzberger faces an even bigger challenge than when he took charge of the Times in the mid-1990s. Can he find a way to rekindle growth while preserving the primacy of the Times’s journalism? The answer will go a long way toward determining not only the fate of America’s most important newspaper but also whether traditional, reporting-intensive journalism has a central place in the Digital Age.

Now those are real challenges. Does Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma point to any answers?

In related news news, Phil points out that a lack of standards and a lack of copyeditors makes the Times less readable. For example, he says: “I wrote to the Times ombudsman to complain about Maureen Dowd’s affection of the British spelling of “whine.” She uses “whinge,” which will stop an American reader in his or her tracks. I was told that every op ed writer is entitled to use the spelling and grammar of his or her choice.”

As anyone who has read this blog knows too well, copyeditors can make a real positive difference. I miss them. They help make me sound smarter.

Fruits of Global Warming

January daffodil

Daffodils, quince, and 80 degrees F high predicted for next Thursday. This weekend will be cool in the mid-60s.

The downside is possibly melanoma.

Daffodils are early but they often wait til Saint David’s Day (March 1).

It’s hard to complain about this much beauty in what should be the dark of winter. Especially when the weather elsewhere is roughed and trying.

To add to the pleasure, I’ve sold a poem that will be the Valentine’s feature in the News and Observer.

All kinds of things are popping up.

CrossFIRED!

Bye to bow-tied twits and to Crossfire as we knew and hated it. Thanks to Jon Stewart.

Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at “Crossfire” when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were “hurting America.”

Mr. Klein said last night, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

The official CNN story on the CNN story here.

Transcript of the Jon Stewart appearance on Crossfire here.

Not that I ever express opinions here ;->

Many Smart People on What Cannot Be Proved (as yet)

“WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the “esprit de divination”). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

“The 2005 Edge Question has generated many eye-opening responses from a “who’s who” of third culture scientists and science-minded thinkers. The 120 contributions comprise a document of 60,000 words.”

From John Brockman‘s Edge come some unexpected responses from some very smart people.

Smart People say Dumb things (and Smart Things)

Bill Gates gets caught with a confused message about copyright in an interview with CNet and ends up calling people who want to share “Communists.” This is certain to throw the mostly Libertarian minded Free Software and Creative Commons folks into chaos — not. See boingboing for the best on this. And the /. responses.
He also has a lot to say about:

  • blogging (“I’ve toyed with doing one myself, but I don’t want to be one of those people who start and then don’t finish it, and again I’m thinking maybe I could do one a month or one every six weeks–something like that. I’d kind of like to, but I’ve got to be sure I can keep going for at least a year to make it worth doing.” and later “E-mail is inefficient today with seeing stuff that’s less relevant and how you organize it–bringing in the blog-type capabilities is very important there.”)
  • his beloved Xbox (“And Xbox Live is really talking to your friends, doing things with your friends”)
  • security (“Well, no one invests more in security of their browser than what we do on IE”)
  • FireFox vs IE (“In terms of our agility to do things on the browser, people who underestimated us there in the past lived to regret that.”)
  • Google (” We’ve been in the search business even before Google was around. The commitment we made is to build unique search technology across the board”)
  • and the future (“the tools around Windows and Office are not even half of what they will be.”)

More local media on local media

Fiona Morgan covers the Durham Herald axings more deeply than anyone so far in this week’s Independent. [This will move to their archives next week].

Geoffrey Graybeal reports, in the Chapel Hill Herald, that WCHL will have a new president and general manager when Walter Sturdivant comes in this week (?) to lead the station. Sturdivant is a UNC School of Journalism grad (1980) and was on the UNC football team where he lead the ACC in kickoff returns.

Herron Poetry on Radio

Patrick Herron wrote to tell me and others that he just taped a poem for WCHL AM to be played on air tomorrow (Thursday January 5) between 7 and 9AM to “WCHL Morning News with Ron Stutts.” I can say without giving anything away that the poem is about Patrick’s friend, Marine Jonathan Kuniholm.
Listen in! Unfortunately WCHL doesn’t webcast but they do archive so the poem may be available later.

EVoting petition from EFF

eVoting EFF logo
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has started an eVoting petition that asks that good safe reliable and open procedures for eVoting be followed.

Dear Election Official:

I believe that election integrity is the foundation of democracy, and that the transparent investigation of election problems is imperative.

I believe that the public has the right to an honest discourse on the performance of its voting technologies, and that knowledge of their performance is a prerequisite for that conversation.

I believe that truly independent security professionals and academic researchers should be not only allowed to examine election technologies, but required to publish their findings.

For these reasons, I urge you to allow independent, non-ITA testing of the voting machines used in your county during the 2004 presidential election.

  1. Visit the EFF eVote site.
  2. Read the good stuff there.
  3. Sign the petition.

RIP: Illustrators Kelly Freas and Will Eisner

What me worry?

Alfred E. Newman
Frank Kelly Freas who was famous for his many sci-fi illustrations, LP covers, and for his work at Mad magazine, died in his sleep at age 82 on January 2nd 2005. Freas won 11 Hugo Awards for his illustrations, but will remain most famous to me for his Alfred E. Newman images in Mad from the early 60s. Note that there is no resemblance between Newman and Larry Lessig pictured below.

Smiling Spirit
Will Eisner, whose Spirit inspired and even nurtured many comic/graphic artists, died at his home in Florida last night. Eisner invented the terms graphic novel (having done the first serious one) and sequential art as well as exemplifying the kind of serious storytelling that could be done in the comic/comix genre. Just to cite one example of Eisner’s influence, Michael Chabon says that:

I think Eisner was unique in feeling from the start that comic books were not necessarily this despised, bastard, crappy, low-brow kind of art form, and that there was a potential for real art. And he saw that from the very beginning, which was very unusual, and I took that quality and gave it to Joe Kavalier.

Lessig on the Connection – WUNC

Lessig in Thought
Larry (err Lawrence) Lessig is coming in clear as usual as he explains the Creative Commons and the upcoming Science Commons on NPR’s The Connection right now (11 am EST) and is taking phone calls. You can listen on WUNC or on the Connection site. The show will be in the Connection Archives NOW. Larry gave nice props to Duke’s Jamie (err James) Boyle and his environmental model for the Commons. Thanks to Brewster for sending an SMS message from Frisco to remind me of the airing.

Feb 12 – TriBlogCon – Wiki, Location, better URL

The Triangle Bloggers Conference for 2005 has a home for its meeting on the morning of Saturday February 12. We’ll meet in the Freedom Forum Conference Center, Carroll Hall on the UNC Campus. Thanks to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication for making this possible. ibiblio is also a sponsor of the Conference.
And we have a better URL to get to the Conference Wiki http://mistersugar.com/triblogs.html .
All of this really made possible by the hard work of Anton Zuiker.

Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Freedom Forum Conference Room, Carroll Hall (j-school)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
FREE

Local media consolidations

One issue I want to address at the Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 is the place of blogs as local media and in local media. We can start here if you like. Are we up for being We, the Media?
What’s making me think about this more often and, I hope, more deeply in the last few months are a few local media changes: WCHL as was noticed on Orange Politics went from very very local to mostly syndicated national shows after a visit from a consultant. The Herald-Sun‘s purchase by Paxton and today’s firing of what WRAL says is 20% of the Herald-Sun staff including four of the paper’s senior officers (Thanks to Phil Meyer for the alert on that one). Potential changes at the Chapel Hill News.
And nationally Pulitzer may be up for sale. With rumors that McClatchy, owner of the News and Observer and others, may be one of the next on the line.
Phil Meyer’s new book is the Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age. It’s a good read for bloggers and for journalists.

Pew on Blogs

The Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project just released one of their more or less well-formed studies (one problem: they often use telephone surveys and those surveys have inherent difficulties in that they don’t often reach cell phone only people or people who are not at home much etc) — this one on the state of blogs. The paper is only in PDF format, but is worth a read.

The abstract says:

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

Who are bloggers (according to Pew):

  • Men: 57% are male
  • Young: 48% are under age 30
  • Broadband users: 70% have broadband at home
  • Internet veterans: 82% have been online for six years or more
  • Relatively well off financially: 42% live in households earning over $50,000
  • Well educated: 39% have college or graduate degrees

Growth in blog-readers far outpaced the growth in blogs themselves. “Still, since [Pew’s] survey in February, there has been greater-than-average growth in blog readership among women, minorities, those between the ages of 30 and 49, and those with home dialup connection.” There is a nice chart that is difficult to extract from the PDF that shows the reader and blogger trends from July 02 to November 04.

MacroInvertebrates and Beavers

On New Year’s Eve day, we went out on the Eno River to my friend, Sylvia Garrard,’s land to take part in the River Watch Program. The idea is to scoop up whatever macroinvertebrates you can find in dip nets and count them. The presence of difference kinds of invertebrates indicates the water quality. Needless to say this is a more fun project in July than in December, but New Year’s Eve this year was unseasonably warm and wonderful — still the water was cold. We found a wide selection of cadis fly larvae, stone fly larvae, dragon fly larvae, crawfish, gill snails, river pennies, a leech, mussels, and more. All this shows that the river along Sylvia’s land is in fine shape.
While we were there we also found lots of beaver work had been going on recently some of it very ambitious. Sally took the pictures.

Breaking 100

In the past week, I’ve been to two UNC basketball games. The first was against Cleveland State (107 – 64). And the second against William and Mary (105 – 66). I can’t complain about winning and I was glad to see both oppponents to continue to scrap and play hard right to the last second.
I did wonder as many there did through our victorious euphoria “What would Dean have done?” These margins of victory are something that we rarely saw when Dean Smith was the coach. Dean believed in taking lopsided matches as an opportunity to play the whole bench. While the bench did see action, especially in the Cleveland State game, it was not to contain the score but as a warning to the starters. This is the sixth game this season in which UNC out scored their opponents by more than 30 points.

Are we seeing the great difference between Roy Williams and Dean Smith? Are we seeing Roy rebuilding the Carolina legend and reputation after some off years?

The good news is that the team played as a team with 6 players scoring in double figures vs Cleveland State and looked good in their passing against William and Mary.

The Rise of Collapse

Collapse: the book
Jerad Diamond speaks (or rather writes) for himself as he condenses his Collapse arguments into a long article on the editorial page of today’s NYTimes called “The Ends of the World as We Know Them”.
Overall, Diamond does a better job describing his Collapse book and the stories therein than either Brand or Gladwell. He is clear that the Norse did not chose exactly for example, but he does point out, as Sally does in her comment, that we have no excuses this time out. Further — and unlike the other reviewers of his book — he points to societies that did no collapse but that saw the signs adapted and endured.
My only complaint at the article is that in my edition of the paper and on the online version of the article, the NYTimes copyeditor was asleep on the job and got the book’s name wrong. It’s not “Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed” but “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”
Alert Diamond observers will have already read his take on Easter Island in the form of a review of other books in an early 2004 article in the NY Review of Books.
Sally and Kottke point to an even earlier article in the June 2003 issue of Harper’s Magazine called “The last Americans: environmental collapse and the end of civilization – Report”

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