journal

A shield for journalists worth supporting?

I've been tracking the progress of the Free Flow of Information Act of 2007 for months. Having spent time in a federal prison for protecting my source material, it's natural that I would be interested in a law that would prevent others from enduring this same fate.

The last time I wrote about the bill's status was in August, after it cleared the House Judiciary Committee. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee followed suit, and both houses of Congress are now ready to vote on the law.

While this is very exciting news for many journalists, I'm less than ecstatic, given that neither the version of the bill is ideal, and there is no telling how the two bills will be combined, should it pass both houses.

While the amended version of the House bill seeks to tie journalism to an economic exchange, the Senate's definition is broader in scope and would not only protect professionals but would likely apply to students and many bloggers as well.… Read more

MSNBC buys social news site Newsvine

Normally we don't report acquisition news, but this one is pretty interesting. MSNBC has scooped up social news service Newsvine for an undisclosed amount. Both services are based out of Seattle and have been in talks for the last five months. Newsvine will continue to operate independently and serve up a mix of professionally produced and user-generated content, remaining a separate brand and entity from MSNBC.com. But content from Newsvine users could be making its way onto MSNBC.com in the near future.

This is a really solid deal for both parties. Newsvine and its users get a … Read more

Words, actions speak different shades of green

Reporters on the front lines of climate change ate locally grown food from biodegradable tableware at the annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference held at Stanford University last week .

Yet, they also boarded gas-guzzling, air-conditioned buses to tour Google's solar headquarters, green buildings in San Francisco and area ecosystems. The nonprofit Environmental Defense handed out folders about safeguarding the oceans. These came inside vinyl shoulder bags that stank of the same toxic chemicals that poison waterways. Most of some 900 attendees flew to the event in petroleum-powered planes to discuss how to report about imperiled ecosystems, from the big … Read more

Wall Street Journal Readers - check this out

On Thursday August 30th Walter Mossberg repeated his prior recommendation of the Mozy online backup service. While Mozy can fit the needs of some people, there are two sides to every coin and there is a downside to Mozy too. For the rest of the story, see my recent postings:

Everybody likes Mozy--except me, Part 1 Everybody likes Mozy--except me. Part 2

Grades for sale at Naples High

Do you remember school fund raise drives? Perhaps you recall being a child having to sell boxes of chocolate, or maybe you recently ran into a young fund raiser outside the supermarket with candy for his band or choir. Then again you might even have the halfway-depleted box your son or daughter couldn't sell last week. I remember being saved from fund raiser hell on more than one occasion, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one. In a twist on this common theme, a high school journalism class at Naples High School has been tasked to sell advertising in their school's yearbook and their grade depends on it.

According to NBC2, the students must sell $600 in ads to receive an A, $500 for a B, $400 for a C, $300 for a D, and students who are unable to sell at least $300 in advertising for the school yearbook will receive an F. While it's certainly true that advertising is an essential component for almost any news organization, it is typically not the role of journalists to solicit these dollars. In fact, there is usually a wall between the advertising staff and the news staff to prevent conflicts of interest when an advertiser ends up in the news.

Learning from retail pricing strategy

I read this fascinating article on the way home from Linuxworld today, and think there must be some way to apply it to open source. OK, the strategy sounds sneaky and underhanded to me, so I'm not going to be implementing it anytime soon.

But surely there's a less nefarious way to do it? More importantly, I'm sure the technology world has much to learn from how retail operates, especially as much of our precious intellectual property becomes commodified.

What is the strategy?… Read more

LiveJournal responds to 'Harry Potter' deletions

Earlier this week, we reported that LiveJournal set off a new round of criticism from its tightly knit user base after it permanently suspended two accounts housing fan art of Harry Potter and friends in sexual situations.

After days of silence, the site's staffers on Tuesday evening published an entry on their business journal in an attempt to clarify the online-journaling server's policy on "illegal and harmful content."

In short, the staffers said they don't review content unless it is reported to them, and when policy violations aren't "clear," they congregate members … Read more

New York Times to ax premium online content, rival says

Note: This story was updated at 6:00 a.m. PDT to include a correction from a New York Times representative regarding TimesSelect subscriber figures cited by the New York Post.

Citing anonymous sources, the New York Post has reported that rival Manhattan paper The New York Times is planning to do away with TimesSelect, the subscription-only content on its NYTimes.com Web site. According to the article by Holly M. Sanders, the main obstacle at the moment is reconfiguring the site's software.

A Times representative told CNET News.com that the company isn't releasing any statement beyond: &… Read more

Is your hairdresser a journalist?

Asking if your hairdresser is a journalist may seem a bit absurd, but the reality is that for many people a trip to the salon is also an opportunity to pick up the latest dirt on who's dating who and other town gossip. We don't usually think of gossip as being journalistic; however, many newspapers have a reporter on staff whose primary duty is to share gossip. Most everyone would consider him or her to be a journalist so why is the idea of your stylist being a journalist considered such a radical idea?

With a Federal Shield law having recently made it out of committee in the House, a debate has flared over who should be protected under the law. A recent amendment to the Shield Law states that only those who benefit financially from their journalism are covered; those who provide the news as a labor of love are excluded. While many of the journalist organizations have applauded this compromise, I think it's important to look at who is excluded and how journalism is an activity that should be protected by a far larger contingent than those qualified under the proposed law.

Facebook and journalism

First it was Friendster, then it was MySpace; now Facebook seems to be the center of every other conversation on the Internet. Several of the writers at Poynter Online (a resource that puports to be "Everything you need to be a better journalist") have recently been focusing on the possibilities for Facebook in terms of the news business.

In one article Pat Walters reports on how he created the Facebook group, Journalists and Facebook as a sort of experiment. What better way to report on Facebook, than to use Facebook? We invited about 25 journalists to join the group, posted a few questions to the discussion board and waited.

Seemed to make perfect sense.

By the time we posted this story on Poynter Online, the group had mushroomed to more than 800 members, journalists and non-journalists from all over the world. At this moment there are almost 1,800 members, but only 57 wall posts, and 22 discussion threads. In his article, Walters points out that this limited participation in the group isn't unusual and he references an article by Jakob Nielsen to illustrate this phenomena. In his article, Nielsen predicts that only one percent of any given group will create most of the content, and after a cursory glance at the Journalists and Facebook group that estimate appears to be roughly on target.