Digital Journalism

Cruise ship sinks creating panic

2012-01-14T08:16:00.001-08:00

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2012/01/14/multimedia/100000001286116/cruise-ship-runs-aground.html

January 17, 2012 - A recorded telephone conversation with the captain of the Costa Concordia reveals he abandoned the cruise ship long before all passengers had been evacuated.

Wearing your computer

2011-12-19T15:33:00.001-08:00

Instead of going through life staring into a mobile device, people one day may be able to wear a computer.

Millions of people stroll through life staring into a mobile device, absorbed by their screens. Technology will solve this problem by creating wearable computers. The idea of someone looking at a screen tapping away with their thumbs may soon be a thing of the paste and computers become more portable - and wearable. Yes, wearable.

Nick Bilton of the New York Times reports that Apple and Google have secretly begun working on projects that will become wearable computers. Their main goal: to sell more smartphones. (In Google’s case, more smartphones sold means more advertising viewed.) In Google’s secret Google X labs, researchers are working on peripherals that — when attached to your clothing or body — would communicate information back to an Android smartphone.

The U.S. military has been studying ways to embed radio transmitters in clothing that would allow soldiers to keep in touch with each other by talking to their clothing. Carbon fibers woven into the shirt or outer wear would pick up wireless signals.

More details here: http://nyti.ms/vOrGXx

Getting Too Social Online

2011-12-18T16:44:00.000-08:00

Lewis Holloway, a schools superintendent in Georgia, has imposed a strict social media policy.

NYT- Faced with scandals and complaints involving teachers who misuse social media, school districts across the country are imposing strict new guidelines that ban private conversations between teachers and their students on cellphones and online platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The policies come as educators deal with a wide range of new problems. Some teachers have set poor examples by posting lurid comments or photographs involving sex or alcohol on social media sites. Some have had inappropriate contact with students that blur the teacher-student boundary. In extreme cases, teachers and coaches have been jailed on sexual abuse and assault charges after having relationships with students that, law enforcement officials say, began with electronic communication.

But the stricter guidelines are meeting resistance from some teachers because of the increasing importance of technology as a teaching tool and of using social media to engage with students. In Missouri, the state teachers union, citing free speech, persuaded a judge that a new law imposing a statewide ban on electronic communication between teachers and students was unconstitutional. Lawmakers revamped the bill this fall, dropping the ban but directing school boards to develop their own social media policies by March 1.

School administrators acknowledge that the vast majority of teachers use social media appropriately. But they also say they are increasingly finding compelling reasons to limit teacher-student contact. School boards in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia have updated or are revising their social media policies this fall.

“My concern is that it makes it very easy for teachers to form intimate and boundary-crossing relationships with students,” said Charol Shakeshaft, chairwoman of the Department of Educational Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has studied sexual misconduct by teachers for 15 years. “I am all for using this technology. Some school districts have tried to ban it entirely. I am against that. But I think there’s a middle ground that would allow teachers to take advantage of the electronic technology and keep kids safe.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/business/media/rules-to-limit-how-teachers-and-students-interact-online.html

6 MediaNews papers to end Monday editions

2011-12-06T11:26:00.000-08:00

Laura Hazard Owen reports that six MediaNews Group papers in California — The Reporter in Vacaville, Times-Herald in Vallejo, Times-Standard in Eureka, Oakland Tribune, Argus in Fremont and The Daily Review in Hayward — will stop printing Monday papers. They’ll also drop any website paywalls on Mondays. The company is calling it “digital-first Mondays” and says it is an alternative cost-saving measure to avoid consolidating some papers. PaidContent has the memo as well.

6 MediaNews papers to end Monday print editions | Poynter.

Star Tribune’s paywall brings in big profits.

2011-12-06T11:22:00.000-08:00

The Star Tribune tells David Brauer how its paywall is doing a month after launch. Ad revenue will suffer from lower traffic, which is down 10 to 15 percent, depending on the metric. But the newspaper has 5,900 new digital subscribers, 1,150 of whom are now getting the Sunday newspaper, too. And more people are paying a bit extra to bundle digital access with their print subscriptions. “So in four weeks, the Strib has potentially reaped about $800,000 in new digital circulation revenue,” Brauer writes.
Star Tribune’s paywall is bringing in more money than it’s costing in ad revenue | Poynter.

NYC police Facebook posts spell trouble

2011-12-06T05:29:00.001-08:00

The West Indian American Day Parade is held annually over the Labor Day weekend as a celebration of Caribbean culture.

Be careful what you post on Facebook. It is advice often offered, but seldom heeded. New York City police are now in hot water over what they posted on the social media site.

The New York Times reports that NYC's finest posted a raw and rude conversation among officers about a West Indian American Day parade. The conversations offered a fly-on-the-wall view of officers displaying roiling emotions often hidden from the public, a copy of the posting obtained by The New York Times shows. Some of the remarks appeared to have broken Police Department rules barring officers from “discourteous or disrespectful remarks” about race or ethnicity. The officers are publicly loathing being assigned to the West Indian American Day Parade in Brooklyn, an annual multi-day event that unfolds over the Labor Day weekend and that has been marred by episodes of violence, including deaths of paradegoers. Those who posted comments appeared to follow Facebook’s policy requiring the use of real names, and some identified themselves as officers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/nyregion/on-facebook-nypd-officers-malign-west-indian-paradegoers.html

The Photoshop Effect

2011-12-04T11:48:00.001-08:00

The Photoshop Effect Video - http://diet.com/videos/ Sarah from diet.com investigates celebrity Photoshop makeover. Discover the truth behind adobe Photoshop and photo retouch. Weight loss controversy and celebrity secrets, what is real? What is fake? See before and after pictures. Should we ban retouching?

WHAT’S NEW? Images of Reese Witherspoon show how a celebrity’s appearance can change radically from cover to cover. Source: New York Times.

Photoshopped or Not? Tools to Find Out

2011-12-04T11:15:00.001-08:00

From left to right, photographs show the five levels of retouching in a system by Hany Farid of Dartmouth. The effect, from slight to drastic, may discourage retouching. “Models, for example, might well say, 'I don't want to be a 5. I want to be a 1,' ” he said.

NYT - The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight — colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed. Or it can be drastic — shedding 10 or 20 pounds, adding a few inches in height and erasing all wrinkles and blemishes, done using Adobe’s Photoshop software, the photo retoucher’s magic wand. Feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled. In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to “discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.” Dr. Hany Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Darmouth are proposing a software tool that would measure how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their work is intended as a technological step to address concerns about the prevalence of highly idealized and digitally edited images in advertising and fashion magazines. Such images, research suggests, contribute to eating disorders and anxiety about body types, especially among young women.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/technology/software-to-rate-how-drastically-photos-are-retouched.html

SEE related story: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/fashion/28RETOUCH.html

Chicago investor group eyes Sun-Times

2011-11-30T12:22:00.000-08:00

Merrick Ventures LLC CEO Michael Ferro Jr., is putting together a buyout group that includes Madison Dearborn Partners LLC Chairman John Canning Jr. In March, Sun-Times lost its chairman and the architect of its September 2009 acquisition when part-owner James Tyree died. His abrupt death left his co-owners, without the visionary who was spearheading their attempt to transform the company into a much more digital, 21st-century media company. The partners paid $5 million plus the assumption of $20 million in debt.

Chicago investor group planning Sun-Times acquisition | Marketing/media | Crain's Chicago Business

FTC Settles Facebook Privacy Deal

2011-11-30T11:16:00.001-08:00

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, said in a blog post Tuesday that the company had made “a bunch of mistakes.” (Click here for interview.)

NYT - SAN FRANCISCO — Accusing Facebook of engaging in “unfair and deceptive” practices, the federal government on Tuesday announced a broad settlement that requires the company to respect the privacy wishes of its users and subjects it to regular privacy audits for the next 20 year.

The order, announced by the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, stems largely from changes that Facebook made to the way it handled its users’ information in December 2009. The commission contended that Facebook, without warning its users or seeking consent, made public information that users had deemed to be private on their Facebook pages.

The order also said that Facebook, which has more than 800 million users worldwide, in some cases had allowed advertisers to glean personally identifiable information when a Facebook user clicked on an advertisement on his or her Facebook page. The company has long maintained that it does not share personal data with advertisers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-agrees-to-ftc-settlement-on-privacy.html
See related story:
Facebook changes privacy settings to enable facial recognition.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/facebook-changes-privacy-settings-to-enable-facial-recognition/?scp=7&sq=Facebook%20privacy&st=Search

Will Digital Save Newspapers ?

2011-11-19T14:55:00.001-08:00

By David Carr, New York Times - Last week, John Paton met with executives of the MediaNews Group, the second-largest newspaper chain by circulation in the country, home to papers like The Denver Post, The Detroit News, The Salt Lake Tribune and a broad swath of dailies throughout California, including The San Jose Mercury News.
Mr. Paton was given control of MediaNews by its owners in September based on his success operating the smaller Journal Register Company after it emerged from bankruptcy in 2009. Among other feats, he increased digital revenue by over 200 percent in his first full year as chief executive.

According to Mr. Paton, his new employees at MediaNews were hoping to discern the silver bullet that would enable them not only to survive, but prosper. Instead, he worked his way through a detailed presentation about outsourcing most operations other than sales and editorial, focusing on the cost side that might include further layoffs, stressing digital sales over print sales with incentives, and using relationships with the community to provide some of the content in their newspapers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/business/media/paton-prepares-his-newspapers-for-a-world-without-print.html

Cashing in on YouTube Videos

2011-11-19T13:57:00.001-08:00

“David After Dentist,” showing a 7-year-old boy talking to his father while recovering from anesthesia

NYT - Katie Clem posted a video on YouTube this month of her daughter Lily’s poignant and funny reaction to her sixth birthday present, a trip to Disneyland, for her friends and family. Then it went viral.

In three weeks it has been watched more than five million times, and Lily has become a minor Internet celebrity. Of far more importance, at least to Lily’s parents, the video is poised to make enough money from advertisements to send Lily to college.

Creating a video that attracts millions of viewers and becomes a pop culture phenomenon involves an unpredictable cocktail of luck and timing. A dash of cute babies or people acting like idiots can only help. But once a video goes viral, making some cold cash depends on quick action.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/technology/personaltech/cashing-in-on-your-hit-youtube-video.html?scp=1&sq=Cashing%20in%20on%20You%20Tube%20Videos&st=Search#

Face Recognition Makes the Leap From Sci-Fi

2011-11-19T12:13:00.001-08:00

NYT - FACIAL recognition technology is a staple of sci-fi thrillers like “Minority Report.”

But of bars in Chicago?

SceneTap, a new app for smart phones, uses cameras with facial detection software to scout bar scenes. Without identifying specific bar patrons, it posts information like the average age of a crowd and the ratio of men to women, helping bar-hoppers decide where to go. More than 50 bars in Chicago participate.

As SceneTap suggests, techniques like facial detection, which perceives human faces but does not identify specific individuals, and facial recognition, which does identify individuals, are poised to become the next big thing for personalized marketing and smart phones. That is great news for companies that want to tailor services to customers, and not so great news for people who cherish their privacy. The spread of such technology — essentially, the democratization of surveillance — may herald the end of anonymity.

And this technology is spreading. Immersive Labs, a company in Manhattan, has developed software for digital billboards using cameras to gauge the age range, sex and attention level of a passer-by. The smart signs, scheduled to roll out this month in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, deliver ads based on consumers’ demographics. In other words, the system is smart enough to display, say, a Gillette ad to a male passer-by rather than an ad for Tampax.

http://www.scenetap.com/

How Social Media Can Be Used By Investigative Journalists

2011-02-07T07:34:00.000-08:00

How Investigative Journalism Is Prospering in the Age of Social Media

In a society that is more connected than ever, investigative journalists that were once shrouded in mystery are now taking advantage of their online community relationships to help scour documents and uncover potential wrongs. The tools and information now available to journalists are making the jobs of investigative outlets more efficient. A survey of journalists, reporters and editors on their use of search and social media in 2008. We found 91% use search engines like Google to do their job. 64% use social networks. Published in Jan 2010, a George Washington University and Cision survey of journalists reports 89% use blogs and 65% use social networks to research stories.

The socialization of the web is revolutionizing the traditional story format. Investigative reporters are now capturing content shared in the social space to enrich their stories, enabling tomorrow’s reporters to create contextualized social story streams that reference not only interviewed sources, but embedded tweets, Facebook postings and more. Journalists are also leveraging the vast reach of social networks in unprecedented ways. In many respects, social media is enabling watchdog journalism to prosper. Even respected news organizations like the BBC are encouraging their journalists to embrace social media.

http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/02/journalists-search-social-media/

Social Media Investigations

2011-02-07T07:32:00.001-08:00

Using Social Media to Do Background investigations.

Social Media Investigations

View more presentations from shelleehale.

Facebook Politicians Are Not Your Friends - Corruption of Social Media and Why It Can't Be Viewed As A News Source

2010-10-11T06:01:00.000-07:00

Great column by one of smartest columnists at the New York Times. - MT

“THE Social Network,” you’re understandably sick of hearing, is a brilliant movie about the Harvard upstart Mark Zuckerberg and the messy birth of his fabulous start-up, Facebook, circa 2004. From the noisy debate over its harsh portrait of Zuckerberg, you’d think it’s a documentary. It’s not. Its genre is historical fiction — with a sardonic undertow. The director David Fincher and the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin are after bigger ironies than the riddle of Zuckerberg, a disconnected geek destined to spawn a virtual community of 500 million “friends.” You leave the movie with the sinking feeling that the democratic utopia breathlessly promised by Facebook and its Web brethren is already gone with the wind.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the gap between the romance and the reality of the Internet more evident than in our politics. In the idealized narrative of digital democracy, greater connectivity has bequeathed more governmental transparency, more grass-roots participation and even a more efficient rendering of political justice. Thanks to YouTube, which arrived just a year after Facebook, a senatorial candidate (George Allen of Virginia) caught on camera delivering a racial slur was brought down swiftly in 2006. Not long after, it was the miracle of social networking that helped enable Barack Obama’s small donors to overwhelm Hillary Clinton’s fat cats, and his online activists to out-organize her fearsome establishment pros.

The more recent miracle of Twitter theoretically encourages real-time interconnection between elected officials and the citizenry. But it too has been easily corrupted by politicians whose 140-character effusions areoften ghost-written by hired 20-somethings, just like those produced for pop stars like 50 Cent and Britney Spears.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/opinion/10rich.html

WOUB Show Examines Changing Media Landscape

2010-10-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

"NewsWatch In-Depth: The Changing Media Landscape" will appear on WOUB-TV Friday, October 15 at 9:30 p.m. A panel of WOUB alumni and media experts will be on hand to help break down the issues facing Appalachia's place in this new media scene. They'll answer questions from the future of the news field - students at Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.

http://www.woub.org/tv/index.php?section=5&page=834

Social Media Marketing: 27 Awesome Stats, Soundbites and Slides

2010-10-01T08:50:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Social Media Marketing: 27 Awesome Stats, Soundbites and Slides

View more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing.

Pew Report: For Teens, Blogging on Decline as Social Media Use Grows | The Rundown News Blog | PBS NewsHour | PBS

2010-09-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

Pew Report: For Teens, Blogging on Decline as Social Media Use Grows | The Rundown News Blog | PBS NewsHour | PBS

Ohio State Mascot Brutus Buckeye Attacked By Rufus

2010-09-21T19:19:00.001-07:00

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Turns out, the Bobcat had it in for the Buckeye all along.

"It was actually my whole plan to tackle Brutus when I tried out to be mascot," said Brandon Hanning, formerly known as Ohio University's Rufus Bobcat. "I tried out about a year ago, and the whole reason I tried out was so I could come up here to Ohio State and tackle Brutus."

And that's what he did Saturday, wrestling unsuspecting Brutus to the ground before 105,075 screaming college football fans at Ohio Stadium. Ohio State got even in the end, trampling the visiting team, 43-7.

The tussle led to an apology from Ohio University on Monday and the 19-year-old Hanning is banned from further affiliation with the school's athletics department.

Social Media, Bloggers Go Mainstream

2010-09-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

The future of social media in journalism will see the death of “social media.” That is, all media as we know it today will become social, and feature a social component to one extent or another. After all, much of the web experience, particularly in the way we consume content, is becoming social and personalized.

But more importantly, these social tools are inspiring readers to become citizen journalists by enabling them to easily publish and share information on a greater scale. The future journalist will be more embedded with the community than ever, and news outlets will build their newsrooms to focus on utilizing the community and enabling its members to be enrolled as correspondents. Bloggers will no longer be just bloggers, but be relied upon as more credible sources. Here are some trends we are noticing, and we would love to hear your thoughts and observations in the comments below.

Collaborative Reporting

Reporting has always in some ways been a collaborative process between journalists and their sources. But increasingly, there’s a merger between the source and the content producer. As a result, more journalism will happen through collaborative reporting, where the witness of the news becomes the reporter, says David Clinch, editorial director for Storyful and a consultant for Skype. Journalists, Clinch says, must be able to pivot quickly between the idea of using the community as a source of news and as the audience for news, because they are both.

This requires a shift in the mindset of journalists, who are used to deciding what news is and how it is covered, produced and distributed, said Alfred Hermida, professor of integrated journalism at the University of British Columbia. “Social media by its very definition is a participatory medium,” Hermida said. “There is a potential for greater engagement and connection with the community, but only if journalists are open to ceding a degree of editorial control to the community.”

For those who involve the community in the reporting process, the payoff can be great. A noteworthy example is the way the newly launched TBD.com, a news startup in Washington D.C., has integrated social media and enlisted a community of bloggers into the newsgathering and production process, creating a collaborative reporting environment. This has allowed them to lay claim to several local scoops, said Liz Heron, social media producer at The New York Times. Heron also says TBD’s engaged community gave them an edge in reporting the Discovery Channel hostage situation.

http://mashable.com/2010/09/13/future-social-media-journalism/

Why Americans Elect Dunces to Public Office

2010-09-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

Everyone seems to complain about Washington and Congress. And I mean everyone. But you get the government you elect. This Pew Center poll found Americans are ignorant when it comes to politics and government. So why should anyone be surprised that we elect unqualified people to elected office ?

An overwhelming proportion of Americans are familiar with Twitter, the online information-sharing network. Perhaps more surprisingly, a large majority also knows that children who are born to illegal immigrants in the United States are automatically U.S. citizens.

Yet the public continues to struggle in identifying political figures, foreign leaders and even knowing facts about key government policies. Only about a third of Americans (34%) know that the government's bailout of banks and financial institutions was enacted under the Bush administration. Nearly half (47%) incorrectly say that the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- widely known as TARP -- was signed into law by President Obama.

Even fewer (28%) are able to identify John Roberts as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. And just 19% know that David Cameron is the new prime minister of Great Britain.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1668/political-news-iq-update-7-2010-twitter-tarp-roberts

News Sites Study Social Media

2010-09-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

WSJ - News organizations are getting more scientific about studying the value of the online readers they are hooking through social media services like Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., as they seek new ways to exploit the channels without cannibalizing their businesses.The efforts come as publications are reporting surging traffic from social media, as they rush to load up their sites with new tools that encourage readers to share their content among friends on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Google and others.

Forty-two percent of social-networking users regularly or sometimes get their news through social-networking sites, according to a report released this week by the Pew Media Center. That is leaving some publishers with the sense that they are better off trying to reach users where they are congregating than trying to corral them on their site.

Kenneth Fuchs, an executive at Sports Illustrated, is studying the habits of the magazine's Twitter followers.

News companies have been pursuing a more metrics-driven approach to disseminating their stories for years. To date, they have often focused on quantifying the impact of search traffic, studying what keywords usually land people at their sites.

Now they are looking for similar patterns with social data, using it to attract new readers, better personalize their experience on the site and potentially target ads.

In a recent survey of 100 online publishers, including traditional news organizations, more than 90% said they have concerns about integrating with Facebook, including how the social-network uses data about their content and who will benefit from long-term revenue. The study was conducted by research group Thinktank Research and sponsored by ShareThis, a social media and analytics company.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704394704575495960178903180.html?KEYWORDS=News+Sites

Medical Industry Ties Often Undisclosed in Journals

2010-09-15T05:19:00.000-07:00

NYT - Twenty-five out of 32 highly paid consultants to medical device companies in 2007, or their publishers, failed to reveal the financial connections in journal articles the following year, according to a study released on Monday. The study compared major payments to consultants by orthopedic device companies with financial disclosures the consultants later made in medical journal articles, and found them lacking in public transparency.

FTC publishes final guidelines for bloggers, social media

2010-09-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it has approved final revisions to the guidance it gives to advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act.

The notice incorporates several changes to the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, which address endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as the disclosure of important connections between advertisers and endorsers. The Guides were last updated in 1980.

Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides – which allowed advertisers to describe unusual results in a testimonial as long as they included a disclaimer such as “results not typical” – the revised Guides no longer contain this safe harbor.

http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm

Troubled Waters

2010-09-09T11:31:00.001-07:00

1st collector for Troubled Waters
Follow my videos on vodpod

My Roommate

2010-09-09T11:30:00.001-07:00

1st collector for My Roommate
Follow my videos on vodpod

Digital Journalism Students Crave 'Old Media'

2010-09-06T10:02:00.001-07:00

Why are there so many young people desperate to get into mainstream media? Every year since I've been teaching journalism at City University London, the post-grad courses have been oversubscribed.

The same is true at other universities offering journalism degrees. And don't get me started on the numbers taking media studies who also believe it will provide an entrée to newspapers, magazines, television, radio and - heavens forfend - PR.

This weekend's Sunday Times magazine feature by Ed Caesar, Hold the front page, I want to be on it, tells how 1,200 people applied last September for a single reporting job on the paper's website.

I am not surprised in the least. Despite the declining sales, the cutbacks, the job insecurity, the low pay (or no pay) and - as Caesar makes abundantly clear - the sheer difficulty of even getting a start, there is an intense desire to obtain a job on a newspaper.

Moreover, this desire should be set in the context of the online skills of almost all the applicants. They may be digital natives who spend hours surfing, communicating via Facebook or Twitter, searching for news and information through Google, but they still want to break into "old media."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/may/18/journalism-education-sundaytimes

Poverty In Athens County

2010-09-06T09:53:00.001-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Does Facebook Discourage Human Interaction?

2010-09-06T09:50:00.000-07:00

NYT - Mister Rogers would be so disappointed in me.

Aside from the people who live in my building, I know the name of only one person who lives on my block: Roger Cohen, a Times colleague.

I want to blame it on the fact that I’m absolutely awful with names and can be quite socially awkward. But that has ever been thus. Then I thought that maybe it was a city thing, but that explanation goes but so far. I’m actually beginning to believe that it’s bigger than me, bigger than my block, bigger than this city. I increasingly believe that less neighborliness is becoming intrinsic to the modern American experience — a most unfortunate development.

A report issued Wednesday by the Pew Research Center found that only 43 percent of Americans know all or most of their neighbors by name. Twenty-nine percent know only some, and 28 percent know none. (Oh, my God! When Roger dashes off to Paris this summer, I’ll become a “none.”)

Yet I have thousands of “friends” and “followers” on the social-networking sites in which I vigorously participate. (In real life, I maintain a circle of friends so small that I could barely arrange a circle.) Something is wrong with this picture.

I am by no means a woe-is-us, sky-is-falling, evil-is-the-Internet type. In fact, I think that a free flow of information has led to greater civic engagement. Yippee! However, I am very much aware that social networks are rewiring our relationships and that our keyboard communities are affecting the attachments in our actual ones.

For instance, a Pew report issued in November 2009 and entitled “Social Isolation and New Technology” found that “users of social networking services are 26 percent less likely to use their neighbors as a source of companionship.”

And a May study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that “college kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago.” The reason? One factor could be social networking. As one researcher put it, “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/opinion/12blow.html

Social Media Sites Send Private Data to Advertisers

2010-05-21T07:21:00.000-07:00

WSJ - Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent.

The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code.

Advertising companies are receiving information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a person's real name, age, hometown and occupation.

Several large advertising companies identified by the Journal as receiving the data, including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social-networking sites, and said they haven't made use of it.

Across the Web, it's common for advertisers to receive the address of the page from which a user clicked on an ad. Usually, they receive nothing more about the user than an unintelligible string of letters and numbers that can't be traced back to an individual. With social networking sites, however, those addresses typically include user names that could direct advertisers back to a profile page full of personal information. In some cases, user names are people's real names.

Most social networks haven't bothered to obscure user names or ID numbers from their Web addresses, said Craig Wills, a professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who has studied the issue.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704513104575256701215465596.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews

NYT lawyer on Pentagon Papers

2008-12-22T13:20:00.001-08:00

more about "NYT lawyer on Pentagon Papers", posted with vodpod

Could U.S. News Soon Be Covered From India?

2008-12-02T07:03:00.001-08:00

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 30, 2008
If an online newspaper in Pasadena, Calif., can outsource coverage to India, I wonder how long can it be before some guy in Bangalore is writing my column about President Obama.

In October, Dean Singleton, The Associated Press’s chairman and the head of the MediaNews Group — which counts The Pasadena Star-News, The Denver Post and The Detroit News in its stable of 54 daily newspapers — told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was looking into outsourcing almost every aspect of publishing, including possibly having one news desk for all of his papers, “maybe even offshore.”http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30dowd.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

How Obama Used Social Networks To Get Elected

2008-11-10T07:18:00.000-08:00

Editor's Note: The Obama campaign and how he got elected will be studied for years to come. It was a watershed event for more reasons than one - the biggest being that Obama communicated with voters in an entirely new way. David Carr is right on target with his analysis here.

The New York Times - In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face.

Always game for something new, Mr. Andreessen headed to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear the guy out. A junior member of a large and powerful organization with a thin, but impressive, résumé, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.

He wondered if social networking, with its tremendous communication capabilities and aggressive database development, might help him beat the overwhelming odds facing him.

“It was like a guy in a garage who was thinking of taking on the biggest names in the business,” Mr. Andreessen recalled. “What he was doing shouldn’t have been possible, but we see a lot of that out here and then something clicks. He was clearly supersmart and very entrepreneurial, a person who saw the world and the status quo as malleable.”

And as it turned out, President-elect Barack Obama was right.

Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.

As a result, when he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern. His e-mail message to supporters on Tuesday night included the line, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” The incoming administration is already open for business on the Web at Change.gov, a digital gateway for the transition.

The Bush campaign arrived at the White House with a conviction that it would continue a conservative revolution with the help of Karl Rove’s voter lists, phone banks and direct mail. But those tools were crude and expensive compared with what the Obama camp is bringing to the Oval Office.

“I think it is very significant that he was the first post-boomer candidate for president,” Mr. Andreessen said. “Other politicians I have met with are always impressed by the Web and surprised by what it could do, but their interest sort of ended in how much money you could raise. He was the first politician I dealt with who understood that the technology was a given and that it could be used in new ways.”

The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing. The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

2008-10-12T19:41:00.001-07:00

Wendy's Hamburgers

more about "", posted with vodpod

Realtors Agree to Stop Blocking Web Listings

2008-05-28T05:02:00.000-07:00

NYT - WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and the National Association of Realtors reached a major antitrust settlement Tuesday that government officials said should spur competition among brokers and ultimately bring down hefty sales commissions.

The deal frees Internet brokers and other real-estate agents offering heavily discounted commissions to operate on a level playing field with traditional brokers by using the multiple listing services that are the lifeblood of the industry, government officials said.

The Justice Department sued the National Association of Realtors in federal court in 2005 on antitrust grounds, charging that its policies were stifling competition and hurting consumers. That case was scheduled to go to trial in Chicago in July.

The settlement “is a win for consumers, certainly, who will now have the benefit of unrestricted competition,” Deborah A. Garza, deputy assistant attorney general for antitrust, said in an interview. “There inevitably will be more efficiency and more competition in the market.”

Real estate agents earned $93 billion in commissions in 2006, with a median commission of about $11,600, Justice Department officials said. Internet brokers, offering pared-down services, provided average rebates of 1 percent on commissions that normally ran 5 or 6 percent, translating into thousands of dollars per sale.

Consumer advocates hailed the settlement as an important and somewhat surprising step by the Bush administration, which has staked out a position on many antitrust issues seen as favorable to business interests. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/business/28realty.html?ex=1369713600&en=aed6850aff4f7006&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Skydiving to Earth from 25 miles up

2008-05-27T05:10:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Fascinating idea for bloggers - blog on the way down to earth using an audio device that converts your words to text and transmits them to earth.

The New York Times - He has spent two decades and nearly $20 million in a quest to fly to the upper reaches of the atmosphere with a helium balloon, just so he can jump back to earth again. Now, Michel Fournier says, he is ready at last.

Depending on the weather, Fournier, a 64-year-old retired French army officer, will attempt what he is calling Le Grand Saut (The Great Leap) on Sunday from the plains of northern Saskatchewan.

He intends to climb into the pressurized gondola of the 650-foot balloon, which resembles a giant jellyfish, and make a two-hour journey to 130,000 feet. At that altitude, almost 25 miles up, Fournier will see both the blackness of space and the curvature of the earth.

Then he plans to step out of the capsule, wearing only a special space suit and a parachute, and plunge in a mere 15 minutes, experiencing weightlessness along the way.

If successful, Fournier will fall longer, farther and faster than anyone in history. Along the way, he can accomplish other firsts, by breaking the sound barrier and records that have stood for nearly 50 years.

“It’s not a question of the world records,” Fournier wrote via e-mail through an interpreter on Friday from his base in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. “What is important are what the results from the jump will bring to the safety of the conquest of space. However, the main question that is being asked today by all scientists is, can a man survive when crossing the sound barrier?”

In the past two weeks, Fournier’s 40-person team has assembled at the launch site, about 90 miles northwest of Saskatoon. The remote Canadian plains were picked after French authorities denied permission because of safety concerns.

Fournier faces plenty of perils. Above 40,000 feet, there is not enough oxygen to breathe in the frigid air. He could experience a fatal embolism. And 12 miles up, should his protective systems fail, his blood could begin to boil because of the air pressure, said Henri Marotte, a professor of physiology at the University of Paris and a member of Fournier’s team.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/sports/othersports/24jump.html?ex=1369540800&en=8af21a3e5add84d2&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Exposed - what i've gained and lost by writing about my intimate life online

2008-05-25T07:25:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: Should blogs be "all about me" - or should the focus be much broader, and focus on a variety to topics of broader interest. Would love to know your thoughts. We will discuss this on Wednesday. - MT

The New York Times - Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I’d been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I spent most of my free time sitting with Henry in our cheery yellow living room on our stained Ikea couch, watching TV. And almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about.

Some of my blog’s readers were my friends in real life, and even the ones who weren’t acted like friends when they posted comments or sent me e-mail. They criticized me sometimes, but kindly, the way you chide someone you know well. Some of them had blogs, too, and I read those and left my own comments. As nerdy and one-dimensional as my relationships with these people were, they were important to me. They made me feel like a part of some kind of community, and that made the giant city I lived in seem smaller and more manageable.

The anecdotes I posted on Emily Magazine occasionally featured Henry, whom my readers knew as a lovably bumbling character, a bassist in a fledgling noise-rock band who said unexpectedly insightful things about the contestants on “Project Runway” and then wondered aloud whether we had any snacks. I didn’t write about him often, but when I did, I’d quote his best jokes or tell stories about vacationing with his family. ttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25internet-t.html?ex=1369454400&en=11ea70ca4615d6e1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Senate Race in Minnesota Shows Power of Bloggers

2008-05-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - EAGAN, Minn. — On a laptop at a kitchen table in this cheery Twin Cities suburb, headlines ripping into Al Franken, the satirist whose campaign for the United States Senate is seen as one of the most competitive in the nation, are written up day after day for Minnesota Democrats Exposed, a political blog created by a former Republican Party researcher.

Michael B. Brodkorb, the blog’s creator, has worked on the campaigns of some of this state’s top Republicans. Mr. Brodkorb’s critics say the Web site’s claims, screamed in red uppercase letters, are often breathless, far-fetched and painfully partisan.

But Minnesota Democrats Exposed has dealt several blows to Mr. Franken’s campaign lately: revelations that he owed $25,000 to the State of New York for failing to pay workers’ compensation insurance and that his corporation was in forfeiture in California.

With only weeks until the state Democratic Party’s convention, where Mr. Franken is expected to win the party’s endorsement to run against Senator Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, people here disagree about how much these financial questions will matter to voters in the fall.

What Mr. Franken’s circumstance has proven, though, is that no Minnesota candidate this fall can afford to ignore Mr. Brodkorb, or the rest of the state’s universe of Web sites devoted to local politics. Experts here say the abundance of these blogs is a mirror onto this state, its partisan split in recent years and its long tradition of intense political activism (by some measures, voter turnout here was the highest in the nation in 2006). That said, they are anything but Minnesota Nice.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/us/politics/25bloggers.html?ex=1369454400&en=49e84e7b92814a8d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

A Video Game Star and His Less-Than-Stellar Pay

2008-05-21T04:24:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Michael Hollick never thought his big break would come in a video game.

All those years when he was struggling to get by as an aspiring actor — tending bar, working in a bagel shop in Morningside Heights, spraying perfume at Bloomingdale’s — he was aiming for Broadway and prime time. As he moved from regional theater to soap operas, middling musicals and “Law & Order,” he remained just another good-looking guy hoping for an audition.

His face still isn’t famous, but Mr. Hollick’s voice and gait have moved into the pop culture firmament recently as those of Niko Bellic, the sardonic, textured Balkan criminal at the heart of Grand Theft Auto IV, the acclaimed gangster fantasy that has become the fastest-selling game to date. Produced by Rockstar Games and its corporate parent, Take-Two Interactive Software, the game has generated at least $600 million in sales over the last three weeks.

Yet even as “Saturday Night Live” has spoofed the Niko character, even as Mr. Hollick’s voice has been heard in tens of millions of homes in advertisements broadcast during “American Idol” and the N.B.A. playoffs, even as fans have flocked to his MySpace page, his triumph has been bittersweet.

That’s because Mr. Hollick was paid only about $100,000 over roughly 15 months between late 2006 and early this year for all of his voice acting and motion-capture work on the game, with zero royalties or residuals in sight, he said.

Had this been a television program, a film, an album, a radio show or virtually any other sort of traditional recorded performance, Mr. Hollick and the other actors in the game would have made millions by now. As it stands, they get nothing beyond the standard Screen Actors Guild day rate they were originally paid.

That is because the contracts between the actors’ union and the entertainment industry make little or no provision for electronic media like video games and the Internet. It is a discrepancy that is expected to dominate negotiations between Hollywood and the guild this summer, with many predicting an actors’ strike to parallel the writers’ strike last year, which revolved around similar issues.
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=3ce8d37c93c2e4b32ac2027ebed90162e37e3906
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/arts/television/21gta.html?ex=1369108800&en=05f9616b1a3d0e73&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Fox Plans to Run Fewer Ads in 2 New Prime-Time Dramas

2008-05-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

The Fox network announced a new approach Thursday to keep viewers hooked on shows: give them fewer commercials.

Peter Liguori, president of Fox Entertainment, announced a plan that would allow two of its new dramas, “Fringe” and “Dollhouse,” to run as many as 50 minutes of story each episode. Standard dramas now average program lengths of 42 to 44 minutes.

“The business needed a jolt,” Mr. Liguori said. “Everybody has been talking about these business initiatives that have nothing to do with the audience.”

The goal, he said, is to get advertisers to pay more per commercial in these shows because the commercials will stand out more.

Showing no fear of the star power of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the Fox network also announced Thursday that it would kick off its new television season by going head to head with the Democratic National Convention the week of Aug. 25http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/business/media/16fox.html?ex=1368676800&en=ac9f3a3ebb12522c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

'The coffee was lousy. The wait was Long''

2008-05-21T04:16:00.000-07:00

THE Rooz Cafe, a restaurant and coffee shop in Oakland, Calif., signals its distaste for patrons who post reviews on Yelp.com with a small sign: No Yelpers.

The sign is routinely ignored by devotees of Yelp, a San Francisco Internet company that enables average folks to write reviews of everything from restaurants to plumbers to parks.

“If you want good coffee and a comfy place to work, I’d recommend this place,” wrote Stephanie S., who gave Rooz four stars. “And the No Yelpers sticker made me laugh.”

Rooz’s owner, Steve Ranjbin, said he put the sticker up as a joke, but added that he had a complaint about Yelp.

“Yelp does not respect us as business owners,” Mr. Ranjbin said. “They don’t listen to business owners unless you’re an advertiser paying Yelp.”

Mr. Ranjbin, who said that amateur reviews can hurt his business, said some had misquoted him or called his employees names, but that Yelp had refused to take these comments down. Yelp rarely removes reviews, even when advertisers complain, preferring to let the crowd have its say.

The proliferating reviews of Mr. Ranjbin’s establishment offer a good illustration of people’s newfound love of comparing notes via reviews online.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 2.5 percent of all Internet users in March went to Yelp.com, and traffic there quadrupled over the last year. Yelp tracks its users through Google Analytics, and the company, which is almost four years old, said it had 9.5 million unique visitors in April, nearly double the 5 million it reported last October. There are more than 2.6 million reviews on the site. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/business/smallbusiness/21yelp.html?ex=1369022400&en=7de6c89c6334aafb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Wall Street Journal Editor Named

2008-05-21T04:13:00.000-07:00

Rupert Murdoch named Robert J. Thomson as the top editor of The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, shifting one of his most trusted advisers from the publisher’s chair into one of the most important editorial jobs in American media.

Mr. Thomson, 47, who has been the top editor of The Times of London, succeeds Marcus W. Brauchli, who was forced out as managing editor after less than a year, after the takeover of The Journal by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation.

In addition to being managing editor of The Journal, Mr. Thomson will hold the title of editor in chief of Dow Jones, The Journal’s parent company, which the News Corporation acquired in December. Assuming the duties of publisher will be Leslie Hinton, another Murdoch loyalist who is chief executive of Dow Jones.

Mr. Thomson has already played a leading role in reshaping The Journal, which has been devoted mostly to business and economic news. Mr. Murdoch envisions a more general-interest newspaper with shorter articles, more hard news on the front page, and more coverage of politics, and national and international affairs.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/business/media/21paper.html?ex=1369108800&en=683cf38874e030e0&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

A Living-Room Crusade via Blogging

2008-05-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - BEIRUT, Lebanon — Jane Novak, a 46-year-old stay-at-home mother of two in New Jersey, has never been to Yemen. She speaks no Arabic, and freely admits that until a few years ago, she knew nothing about that strife-torn south Arabian country.

And yet Ms. Novak has become so well known in Yemen that newspaper editors say they sell more copies if her photograph — blond and smiling — is on the cover. Her blog, an outspoken news bulletin on Yemeni affairs, is banned there. The government’s allies routinely vilify her in print as an American agent, a Shiite monarchist, a member of Al Qaeda, or “the Zionist Novak.”

The worst of her many offenses is her dogged campaign on behalf of a Yemeni journalist, Abdul Karim al-Khaiwani, who incurred his government’s wrath by writing about a bloody rebellion in the far north of the country. He is on trial on sedition charges that could bring the death penalty, with a verdict expected Wednesday.

Ms. Novak, working from a laptop in her Monmouth County living room “while the kids are at school,” has started an Internet petition to free Mr. Khaiwani. She has enlisted Yemeni politicians, journalists, human rights activists and others around the globe. Her blog goes well beyond the Khaiwani case and has become a crucial outlet for opposition journalists and political figures, who feed her tips on Yemeni political intrigue by e-mail or text messagehttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/world/middleeast/20blogger.html?ex=1369022400&en=3f4a643b2f79e449&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Lehrer Says ‘News Hour’ Money Woes Are Worst Eve

2008-05-19T04:47:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - It has been a rough few weeks for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS.

In late April, Mr. Lehrer, who turns 74 on Monday, had aortic valve replacement surgery. He said he was recovering nicely and expects to be back on the air toward the end of June. But the nightly newscast’s funding situation could take longer to heal.

In its 25 years on the air, “NewsHour” has had fallow budget periods, but none that equal the current one, Mr. Lehrer acknowledged. The financial squeeze was precipitated last summer when Archer Daniels Midland ended its 14-year sponsorship of the program. That sponsorship provided nearly $4 million (and some years as much as $7 million) of the program’s yearly budget, which varies from $26 million to $28 million.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/business/media/19newshour.html?ex=1368936000&en=6c77012a8e7698e1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Another Beltway Institution Seeks New Leader

2008-05-19T04:37:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - There’s soul-searching and campaigning going on, a lot of old hands are leaving, and people in Washington wonder who is going to be in charge next year.Yes, they’re looking at the White House, too, but this transition is about another fabled institution, The Washington Post.

The executive editor since 1991, Leonard Downie Jr., will almost certainly be gone by the time a new president is inaugurated next January. The new publisher, Katharine Weymouth, has been talking about — and talking to — potential successors to Mr. Downie, according to several people who have discussed the matter with her, Mr. Downie and other Post executives.

No one in a position to know would address the subject on the record, and those who did speak insisted on anonymity so as not to invoke the ire of their bosses and friends.

The Post has been an exceptionally stable place in a tumultuous industry. Just two people have held the top newsroom position over the last 43 years: Mr. Downie and his predecessor, Benjamin C. Bradlee. Ms. Weymouth’s uncle, Donald E. Graham, has overseen The Post in various capacities for more than three decades as general manager and then publisher of the paper, and later as chief executive and chairman of the Washington Post Company.

But this is a time of transition and turmoil, roiling what should be a triumphant valedictory for Mr. Downie, a deeply respected leader whose paper just won six Pulitzer Prizes for its work in 2007, the most it had ever won in a single year.

The latest uncertainty is the new publisher, Ms. Weymouth, who represents the fourth generation of the family that has controlled the paper for 75 years. The niece of Mr. Graham and granddaughter of Katharine Graham, Ms. Weymouth has worked at the company since 1996, spending the last three years as the head of advertising.

She took over as publisher just a few months ago and wants to install an editor of her choosing; people inside and outside the paper who have discussed the situation with them say that Mr. Downie is not exactly being forced out, but that she is pressuring him, and he is not happy about it. Mr. Downie said that he is under no such pressure, and Ms. Weymouth declined to be interviewed.

For now, there is no obvious successor to lead that transition. Ms. Weymouth’s short list to replace Mr. Downie, according to people who have talked to her and other Post executives, includes Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek magazine, which is owned by the Washington Post Company; David Ignatius, a Post columnist and associate editor, and a former editor of The International Herald Tribune; and Marcus W. Brauchli, who was recently ousted as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/business/media/19post.html?ex=1368936000&en=3dd58e83812394aa&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

U.S. Television Taps More Imported Series

2008-05-19T04:33:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - To the lengthy list of commodities America imports that it also produces domestically — oil, cars, clothing, cheese, wine — you can add ideas for television series. Now that the biggest broadcast networks have presented their plans for the coming fall season, in an annual ritual known as upfront week, Madison Avenue is studying the schedules for 2008-9 season to help advertisers decide where to buy commercial time. One trend being noticed by the executives at media agencies is a growing reliance on series concepts from abroad.

Among the newcomers whose roots can be traced overseas are “The Ex List,” at 9 p.m. Friday on CBS, from Israel; “Kath and Kim,” at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday on NBC, from Australia; “Secret Millionaire,” at 9 p.m. Thursday on Fox (starting in January), from Britain; and “Worst Week,” at 9:30 p.m. Monday on CBS, from Britain.

In fact, two series with British pedigrees will face off against each other at 10 p.m. Thursday: “Eleventh Hour,” on CBS, and “Life on Mars,” on ABC.

Among the series with their genesis overseas that are already on the biggest broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, CW, Fox and NBC — are hits like “American Idol,” “Dancing With the Stars,” “Deal or No Deal” and “Survivor.”

“It’s less expensive to acquire and adapt rights than develop something from scratch,” said Shari Anne Brill, senior vice president and director for programming at Carat in New York, part of the Aegis Group.

That is important as the shaky national economy throws into doubt the ability of marketers to spend more on TV ads in the fall and beyond. In other words, when revenue growth is threatened, cut costs.

Another reason for relying on ideas from abroad is the interruption of the flow of home-grown scripts because of the 100-day strike by writers against the TV and movie studios. Although the strike was settled in February, it disrupted the production process for 2008-9.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/business/media/19adcol.html?ex=1368936000&en=b23c0bacdd218fbe&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Web not recession proof: price cutting hits online ads

2008-05-19T04:24:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - In the past few years, Web publishers have made a big bet on booming online advertising revenues. But the economic slowdown may be throwing a wrench into those plans.

While search advertising remains strong, there are signs that the growth in online advertising — particularly in more elaborate display ads — is slowing down. In the past few weeks, major online-advertising players, like Yahoo and Time Warner, have posted mixed results.

And online publishers may be getting less money for the ad space they do sell. The prices paid for online ads bought through ad networks dropped 23 percent from March to April, according to PubMatic, an advertising-technology company in Palo Alto, Calif., that runs an online-pricing index. Large Web publishers fared the worst in PubMatic’s study, with the prices they received through networks dropping 52 percent.

These are only preliminary results, and the economy could turn around more quickly than anyone expected even a month ago. But, these numbers must be worrisome for Web portals, newspaper publishers and news media companies like CBS (which announced a $1.8 billion deal last week to buy CNet Networks) looking to expand their revenues from high-priced display advertising, like graphics-heavy banners and column adshttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/technology/19online.html?ex=1368936000&en=fb765f1158b3a5fd&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Pursuit of Yahoo Shows Microsoft Needs a Franchise

2008-05-19T04:20:00.000-07:00

The New York TImes - Two weeks after walking away from takeover talks with Yahoo, Microsoft made clear on Sunday that it still needed to create an Internet powerhouse that could rival Google — and that its interest in Yahoo had not waned.

Microsoft said on Sunday that it had approached Yahoo, this time with an ostensibly narrower aim: a collaboration on Internet advertising. But it hinted that it could still seek a takeover down the road.

The renewed talks reflect both Microsoft’s fears and Yahoo’s potential ills. Microsoft wants to head off any collaboration on advertising between Yahoo and the market leader, Google. At the same time, Microsoft is seeking to capitalize on the perceived weakness of Yahoo, which is facing a proxy battle with the activist investor Carl C. Icahn over the failed takeover talks.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/technology/19soft.html?ex=1368936000&en=1d763bdf51edbec0&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Earthquake Opens Gap in Controls on Media

2008-05-19T04:17:00.000-07:00

The New York TImes - SHANGHAI — Two and a half hours after a huge earthquake struck Sichuan Province on Monday, an order went out from the powerful Central Propaganda Department to newspapers throughout China. “No media is allowed to send reporters to the disaster zone,” it read, according to Chinese journalists who are familiar with it.

When the order arrived, many reporters were already waiting at a Shanghai airport for a flight to Sichuan’s provincial capital, Chengdu. A few were immediately recalled by their editors, but two reporters from the Shanghai newspaper The Oriental Morning Post, Yu Song and Wang Juliang, boarded a plane anyway. Soon, they were reporting from the heart of the disaster zone.

Their article filled an entire page of the next day’s Post, one of the first unofficial accounts of the tragedy by Chinese journalists. It included a graphic description of the scene and pictures of a mourning mother, a rescued child and corpses wrapped in white bunting. The paper further risked offending censors by printing an all-black front page that day, stressing the scale of the catastrophe.

The earthquake has tested this country in many ways, including a death toll that has steadily climbed into the tens of thousands and the logistical nightmare of reaching isolated hamlets in a mountainous region with narrow, treacherous roads.

One of the biggest challenges, though, is to the country’s sometimes sophisticated, sometimes heavy-handed propaganda system. China’s censors found themselves uncharacteristically hamstrung when they tried to micromanage news coverage of the earthquake, as they do most major news stories in China.

By Wednesday, so many reporters had ignored the government’s instructions that the Propaganda Department rescinded its original order, replacing it with another, more realistic one, reflecting its temporary loss of control. “Reporters going to the disaster zone must move about with rescue teams,” it said, giving tacit, retroactive approval to freer coverage.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/world/asia/18press.html?ex=1368849600&en=dd3cd7491ec765eb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Chinese blog nonstop about quake

2008-05-19T04:13:00.000-07:00

BEIJING (AP) -- Almost nonstop, the uncensored opinions of Chinese citizens are popping up online, sent by text and instant message across a country shaken by its worst earthquake in three decades.

''Why were most of those killed in the earthquake children?'' one post asked Thursday on FanFou, a microblogging site.

''How many donations will really reach the disaster area? This is doubtful,'' read another.

China is now home to the world's largest number of Internet and mobile phone users, and their hunger for quake news is forcing the government to let information flow in ways it hasn't before.

A fast-moving network of text messages, instant messages and blogs has been a powerful source of firsthand accounts of the disaster, as well as pleas for help and even passionate criticism of rescue efforts.

''I don't want to use the word transparent, but it's less censored, an almost free flow of discussion,'' said Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the China Internet Project, which monitors and translates Chinese Web sites.

China is well known for controlling the flow of information.

''We didn't know that hundreds of thousands of lives passed away during the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 until many years after the disaster took place,'' sociologist Zheng Yefu said in a commentary last week in the Southern Metropolis News.

CBS to Pay $1.8 Billion for CNET Networks

2008-05-15T06:31:00.000-07:00

CBS said Thursday it would buy CNET Networks for $1.8 billion in cash, marking its biggest online acquisition since hiring Quincy Smith, a former media and technology investment banker, to lead its interactive unit in late 2006. The deal came as CNET, whose assets include a popular technology-news Web site, was trying to fend off a group of activist investors seeking to take control of its board of directors.

A year and a half ago, Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, sought to reassure Wall Street that his efforts to expand CBS’s Web footprint would not include expensive acquisitions.

“We are not going to spend $1.6 billion on YouTube,” he told The New York Times, referring to the video-sharing site that Google had recently bought. “We are looking for the next YouTube and Quincy knows all the players.

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/15/cbs-to-pay-18-billion-for-cnet-networks/

NBC Sue Simmons Drops the F-bomb

2008-05-15T06:17:00.000-07:00

Sue Simmons, a longtime NBC news anchor in New York, apologized Tuesday for using the f-word on air during a news promo on Monday.

Simmons, an anchor for New York's WNBC-TV, made the apology after cursing on the live promo.

During the 10 pm hour, WNBC featured a brief promo for the 11 pm news with Simmons and Chuck Scarborough. Simmons was teasing a story about rising grocery prices when the footage laid over her voice switched to a cruise ship that had a passenger go overboard.

Simmons then yelled "What the f--- are you doing?"

The outburst was followed by nearly eight seconds of silence.

During the 11 pm hour, Simmons offered her apology for using the f-bomb, saying that she was "truly sorry".

There was no word from the station if the curse word incident who cause Simmons to be suspended or reprimanded further.

http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=46503&cat=2

Craig (of the List) Looks Beyond the Web

2008-05-12T05:07:00.000-07:00

New York Times - The Craig in Craigslist is looking at life beyond his little list that happens to be the seventh-most-popular Web site in the United States.

It is also a site that is deeply tied up with the fate of newspapers — indeed, many in the newspaper industry blame the site’s founder, Craig Newmark, for the downturn in their classified-advertising business.

An ardently no-frills, ad-free, user-sensitive site, Craigslist has, by the estimate of its chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, generated more than 600 million free classified listings. (Though nearly all listings remain free, Craigslist has added modest fees for job listings and real estate brokers in certain big cities, and from those fees the company generates $80 million to $100 million in annual revenue. It has a staff of 25, including Mr. Newmark.)

In the United States and beyond, Craigslist is digging even deeper into the classified-ad markets. Once, an announcement that Craigslist was expanding meant adding cities like Miami, Minneapolis and Philadelphia. These days, it means smaller places like Janesville, Wis., (population: about 60,000) and Farmington, N.M., (roughly 38,000) as well as Cebu in the Philippines and, by Mr. Newmark’s request, a site for Ramallah on the West Bank.

In the face of this expansion, Mr. Newmark is becoming more of a public figure, capitalizing on his success to promote causes that include supporting the Barack Obama campaign and financing investigative journalism — not, he insists, to compensate for any damage Craigslist has done to the newspaper business, which he calls “an urban myth.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/technology/12craig.html?ex=1368331200&en=c37fa32d82b7a85d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Fox Business Redefines Lineup in Daytime TV

2008-05-12T05:02:00.000-07:00

Viewers of the Fox Business Network — and it remains unclear how many there are — may notice a number of changes on Monday.

Some anchors, like Alexis Glick, Stuart Varney and Liz Claman, will get better face-time. Some programs will be broken into one-hour segments to make them seem more focused. New programs will be introduced to punch up the hours surrounding the 4 p.m. market close.

“The nice thing about a start-up is that you get to make a lot of tweaks,” said Kevin Magee, an executive vice president at Fox Business Network.

The network, a business-minded offshoot of the Fox News Channel, went on the air in October and is available in more than 35 million homes. While its audience is being measured by Nielsen Media Research, the numbers have not been made public. (The early estimates, from December, pegged the figures very low.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/business/media/12fox.html?ex=1368244800&en=14ad385bdd42057b&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

In the Age of TiVo and Web Video, What Is Prime Time?

2008-05-12T04:47:00.000-07:00

New York TImes - This week, the television upfronts — in which the broadcast networks present their schedules to advertisers — will open with a mystery. Who stole six million viewers?

That’s the number who were watching prime time television last May, a month affectionately known as “sweeps,” but have disappeared this year, according to the overnight Nielsen ratings. Each of the major broadcast networks, save for Fox, has seen its audience decline this season. The ratings for hit shows like “American Idol” and “CSI” have approached record lows.

Where some of last May’s 44 million viewers went is not a mystery, according to the networks. The writers’ strike this winter deflated the ratings and accelerated the flight of viewers to cable channels.

But the more significant shift can’t be blamed on the strike. In the past television season, there has been a sharp increase in time-shifting. Some of the six million are still watching, but on their own terms, thanks to TiVos and other digital video recorders, streaming video on the Internet, and cable video on demand offerings. So while overall usage of television is steady, the linear broadcasts favored by advertisers are in decline.

The mystery, then, is what the networks should do now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/business/media/12ratings.html?ex=1368331200&en=86f83a922c6e1619&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Print publication's survival guide: go online

2008-05-05T04:42:00.000-07:00

It may be a niche publisher, but the International Data Group has been working out the answers to some big mainstream questions. The biggest one: Can print media survive the transition to the Internet

The question has taken on new urgency lately. A faltering economy is heightening the pressure on newspapers and magazines to find a sustaining future online, as the flight of readers and advertisers to the Web accelerates.

Just last week, The Capital Times, a 90-year-old daily newspaper in Madison, Wis., ended its print version and began publishing only online.

The journey beyond print is uncertain and perilous, but the experience of I.D.G., the world’s largest publisher of technology newspapers and magazines, suggests that it can be done. A privately held company, whose magazines include Computerworld, InfoWorld, PC World, Macworld and CIO, it appears to have made a profitable migration to the Internet, with revenue from online ads now surpassing print revenue.

Advertisers and readers of high-tech publications have moved online more swiftly than other audiences, so I.D.G. may offer a glimpse of the future of publishing. Yet the transition at I.D.G. came only after years of investment, upheaval and changes in its practice of journalism.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/business/media/05idg.html?ex=1367726400&en=5c979f4c5bf391bc&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Why Blog When You Can Just Talk Instead ?

2008-05-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

Why blog (write) when you can accomplish the same thing using a webcam? There's a new trend in blogging - use simple video instead of actually writing a blog - do you think it works? What follows is just one of many snippets out there. - MT

Bloggingheads: Barack's Blues
Bloggers Mark Kleiman and Jeralyn Merritt debate whether blue-collar Democrats would abandon Barack Obama in the general election.http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=5de074c69f4df15bd98bb062d30ee75c8f1817d3

http://bloggingheads.tv/

The Power To Shock

2008-05-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - "Gun Play," 1979. Back in the 1970s, a gutsy blonde named Jill Freedman armed with a battered Leica M4 and an eye for the offbeat trained her lens on the spirited characters and gritty sidewalks.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/04/26/nyregion/042708-Freedman_index.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Next Train, Never

2008-05-04T08:08:00.000-07:00

Few people know about this long-empty platform in the underbelly of the subway station at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/04/19/nyregion/042008-Cityvisible_index.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

I take this cyberpal to be my bridesmaid

2008-05-04T08:03:00.000-07:00

Brides-to-be swap ideas online, sympathize or simple chat, forging bonds faster than a flying bouquet.

Theknot.com is just one of several popular bridal Web sites. Others include brides.com and weddingchannel.com. Involvement often starts with a simple inquiry about a banquet hall or a video photographer. But as message boards turn into forums to discuss in-laws or to snipe at tacky boudoir pictures, women become dependent on them.

Some brides chat from their desks at work, others can’t go to bed before signing in one more time, some even tune out their fiancé’s voice while riveted to the computer.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/fashion/weddings/04FIELD.html?ex=1367467200&en=162909fa61ed1c6a&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Mean Girl Chatter is Hard to Quash

2008-05-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

The New York Times (5-4-08) AT 12:04 P.M. on April 25, a skirmish broke out on Jezebel.com.

It began when the upstart Web site for women, whose slogan is “Celebrity, sex, fashion. Without airbrushing,” posted a photo of Angelina Jolie in a low-cut yellow dress. As part of a popular feature called Snap Judgment, readers offered biting comments on everything from Ms. Jolie’s eye-popping neckline to her possible state of mind.

Then a commenter with the screen name Calraigh wrote that, despite being pregnant, Ms. Jolie looked like “an Ethiopian famine victim.” Within minutes, a half-dozen angry readers had made their own snap judgments of Calraigh:

“You’re gross.”

“Are you serious?”

“That comment is inappropriate. I don’t know what website you think you are on, but that is not how we roll.”

The Jezebel blog was founded last spring by Gawker Media as a smart, feisty antidote to traditional women’s magazines (or “glossy insecurity factories,” as Jezebel describes them). It quickly developed a loyal following and has seen an influx of new visitors, after being name-checked on the official blog for “Gossip Girl,” the prime-time soap opera.

But as Jezebel’s first anniversary approaches on May 21, its readers and editors are learning a lesson right out of high school: popularity has its pitfalls, and mean-girl behavior is hard to quash.

Some readers, in comments on the site, have accused editors of political bias and misogyny. Readers have called one another, by turns, immature, boring and cliquish. This spring the editors responded by banishing certain commenters and putting others “on notice” for being nasty or, worse, not funny.

“I feel like Jezebel is a club more than a blog,” wrote Elizabeth Palin, 26, an accountant from Fayetteville, N.C., who comments under the screen name Muffyn.

All this over a Web site that set out to be — dare one say it? — nice.

When Anna Holmes, the managing editor of Jezebel, was hired to create what her new employers described to her as a “girly Gawker,” she thought long and hard about how much of its parent company’s infamous snarkiness to adopt.

“I wanted Jezebel to be welcoming,” Ms. Holmes said during a rare weekday foray out of her home office in Long Island City.

WRITTEN and edited by a staff of seven women, the blog mixes style commentary and gossip with no-holds-barred posts about politics, the economy, sexism and, certainly, sex.

Recent posts — they go up about every 15 minutes from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays — include commentary on Texas polygamists, a discussion about fertility and a critique of Scarlett Johansson’s singing skills. There are regular features such as Pot Psychology, in which Tracie Egan, an editor, answers readers’ sex questions while under the influence of marijuana, and Cover Lies, a send-up of women’s magazines. (One, in April, bore the headline, “Well Isn’t the Cosmo ‘Sexy Issue’ Just a Sexy Breath of Fresh Sexual Sexy Sex Air!”)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/fashion/04jezebel-1.html?ex=1367553600&en=16539643deed6777&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Who's spying on you? Oh, it's only your parents.

2008-05-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

The New York Times (5-4-08)ON school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses.

But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?

Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say.

When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment.

A profusion of online programs that can track a student’s daily progress, including class attendance, missed assignments and grades on homework, quizzes and tests, is changing the nature of communication between parents and children, families and teachers. With names like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool, the software is used by thousands of schools, kindergarten through 12th grade. PowerSchool alone is used by 10,100 schools in 49 states.

Although a few programs have been available for a decade, schools have been using them more in recent years as federal reporting requirements have expanded and home computers have become more common. Citing studies showing that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance, educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/fashion/04edline.html?ex=1367553600&en=d4d1204632971bb3&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

The Problems With iMovie 8

2008-04-30T19:50:00.000-07:00

When Apple released a new version of its iLife suite—its $80 package containing iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb and GarageBand, last August, few Mac users had much good to say about the program. What follows is New York Times David Pogue's blog.

The enhancements in iPhoto, iWeb and GarageBand are great. But iMovie ‘08 is an utter bafflement.

Most people are used to a product cycle that goes like this: Release a new version every year or two, each more capable than the last. Ensure that it’s backward-compatible with your existing documents.

IMovie ‘08, on the other hand, has been totally misnamed. It’s not iMovie at all. In fact, it’s nothing like its predecessor and contains none of the same code or design. It’s designed for an utterly different task, and a lot of people are screaming bloody murder.

The new iMovie was, as Apple admits, designed primarily for throwing together movies quickly. It lets you scan through a clip to see what’s in it, isolate the good parts, and rapidly drop them into a sequence.

But iMovie 6 was just as good at those tasks; you could scrub through, chop and drag its clips just as easily. Meanwhile, iMovie ‘08 is incapable of the more sophisticated editing that the old iMovie made so enjoyable. The old iMovie offered the essential tools of professional programs like Final Cut Pro without the cost or complexity.

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/apple-takes-a-step-back-with-imovie-08/index.html?hp&scp=2-b&sq=imovie+8&st=nyt

Unspoken Words At the Wall Street Journal

2008-04-28T05:25:00.000-07:00

The New York Times (4-28-08) On Wednesday night, employees of The Wall Street Journal gathered in the Grill Room at the World Financial Center to bid farewell to Stuart Karle, the former general counsel of The Journal, a tenacious defender of journalism who is regarded as a reporter’s lawyer.

The event was held by Marcus W. Brauchli, the paper’s managing editor, who will be getting his own send-off soon enough after it was revealed last Tuesday that he would be stepping down just four months after Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought the paper’s corporate parent, Dow Jones & Company, and serving as a consultant with unspecified responsibilities instead.

Mr. Brauchli, who had the look of the recently run over, stuck to prepared remarks, wanly observing that he chose this time to resign because he didn’t want to be outshone by Mr. Karle, his friend and former classmate at Columbia. Mr. Karle then cracked wise that he was glad Mr. Brauchli’s corporate credit card hadn’t been canceled yet. Funny stuff.

Mr. Karle then urged the journalists in attendance — along with an interloper from another newspaper who hung in the back — to continue the newspaper’s history of vigorous and unfettered pursuit of the truth. But there were elephants, big ugly ones, all over the room, chief among them that neither Mr. Brauchli nor Mr. Karle would now be there to defend that work.

Both men, who had spent their lives helping others speak truth to power, were unwilling to do the same after getting kicked to the curb. Each is under a nondisparagement clause as part of his negotiated agreement, so Journal reporters and editors watched the odd specter of a First Amendment lawyer and a lifelong journalist talking about everything except what was on everyone’s mind.

Not everyone was smiling.

“Here you have two people who are icons of freedom of expression and they can’t talk because of NDA’s they signed,” said one reporter who was in the room but did not want to be identified speaking ill of his former bosses. “It was disgusting. They were talking about preserving the culture of The Wall Street Journal when it’s clear that the buffer is gone and that culture is history.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/business/media/28carr.html?ex=1367035200&en=6fb5a7a37a131d76&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Golden Years of Television Find New Life on the Web

2008-04-28T05:21:00.000-07:00

Television distributors have recently made thousands of episodes of programs like “The Twilight Zone” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” available free online.

In putting old episodes online, broadcasters are tapping into the “long tail” of niche content that the Internet has monetized. While executives are reticent about the costs involved, and while syndicated and DVD sales remain dominant sources of revenue, the repurposing of long-dead shows is creating another new revenue stream for distributors.

Advertising-supported TV streaming sites like Hulu, Veoh and Joost are forming a time tunnel to 50 years of television — to shows like “Bewitched” and “Seinfeld” (and even 26 episodes of the 1966 drama “The Time Tunnel”).

The online re-creation of the WB — a network that disappeared in 2006 when it merged with UPN to become the CW — will represent another step in that direction. While Warner Brothers would not confirm the plans, preferring to wait until a press conference on Monday, Bruce Rosenblum, the president of the company’s television group, said in an interview last week that “premium ad-supported digital destinations that are demographic-specific” are a key part of its strategy going forwardhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/business/media/28tube.html?ex=1367035200&en=8e78801c2c3f3f5a&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Murdoch’s ‘Head of Content’

2008-04-28T04:47:00.000-07:00

In a long career, Robert Thomson has left a trail of happy reporters in his wake — at The Financial Times and more recently at The Times of London, where the newsroom under his guidance was, in the words of a former colleague, “the happiest place to work on Fleet Street.”

He’s got his work cut out for him at The Wall Street Journal.

Last Wednesday morning Mr. Thomson, who is 47, walked into the morning news meeting at The Journal, his first day as the de facto editor in the wake of the resignation of the managing editor, Marcus W. Brauchli, whom Mr. Thomson has known since the 1980s when the two were foreign correspondents in Beijing,

With editors assembled around the table, Mr. Thomson said the paper would not rush to replace Mr. Brauchli, and he assured the group that people who thought the paper was straying from its traditions were misinformed. Then, he said, he offered something no reporter or editor could resist: more space for more words.

Mr. Thomson said that the News Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and which bought the newspaper’s parent company, Dow Jones, last year for close to $5 billion, would invest $6 million a year to add four pages for international news.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/business/media/28thomson.html?ex=1367035200&en=c65adb6620234cf3&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Murdoch Moving to Buy Newsday for $580 Million

2008-04-23T04:27:00.000-07:00

New York Times (4-23-08) Rupert Murdoch is moving to tighten his already-imposing grip on American news media, striking a tentative deal to buy his third New York-based paper, Newsday, and getting his first chance to appoint the top editor of The Wall Street Journal, after the resignation of the editor on Tuesday.

His $580 million bid for Newsday and his urgency in remaking The Journal worry his competitors and cause angst in many newsrooms, including his own. And both moves are vintage Rupert Murdoch, a man who operates his sprawling News Corporation like an old-style media mogul, making big bets on old and new media — bankrolling the new Fox Business Network, aggressively pursuing a deal for Yahoo, and buying Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Journal, for far more than analysts thought it was worth. And that was just in the last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/business/media/23paper.html?ex=1366689600&en=db6c1c835ad41eb4&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Making Money the How-to-Video Way

2008-04-23T04:21:00.000-07:00

(WSJ 4-23-08) Learning how to turn a flashlight into a laser is not a top priority for most people. Yet Kip Kedersha’s step-by-step instructional video that teaches how to do just that has been seen online by more people (1.88 million) than live in Manhattan (about 1.6 million).

Mr. Kedersha’s online library of 94 videos includes tips on how to chill a Coke in two minutes, simulate a gunshot wound and start up a PC quickly.

Many of the clips have been played hundreds of thousands of times, turning Mr. Kedersha into the top earner on Metacafe, a video-sharing Web site that pays the makers of popular videos. In little more than a year, the site has written him checks totaling $102,000.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/technology/23howto.html?ex=1366689600&en=40572b6a3b515383&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

New cameras put a smile on your face

2008-04-23T04:17:00.000-07:00

(WSJ 4-23-08) Most digital cameras have more settings than the average person knows what to do with -- from common adjustments for nighttime and face shots to obscure settings for sports, fireworks and snow scenes.

When the moment comes to take the perfect picture of a snowy mountaintop, Fourth of July fireworks or soccer goal in midkick, most people forget about these features or don't know how to use them. And while many digital cameras can now detect faces and make sure they are in focus, they can't tell whether that face is smiling or not. The results aren't bad, but they could be much better.

This week, I tested three new digital cameras that claim to do the thinking for you. Some digitally analyze the scene you're about to capture, automatically choosing the setting that would take the best picture. Others can detect when a subject is smiling so as to automatically know when to snap the photo. One camera even attempts to digitally alter frowning faces into smiles, with amusing results.

I tried out Sony's $300 Cyber-shot DSC-W170, Kodak's $250 EasyShare Z1085 IS and Olympus's $200 FE-340. Only the Sony includes all three of the aforementioned features; the Kodak has scene detection, and the Olympus camera has built-in smile detection. I found the automatic scene detection offered in the Sony and Kodak cameras to be the most useful feature for everyday photos. It improved my photos and didn't require any extra adjustments. I handed the cameras to other people to take pictures, without having to change any settings.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120889435178135615.html?mod=hps_us_inside_today

Who Owns Sports Coverage?

2008-04-21T04:20:00.000-07:00

New York Times (4-21-08) Recently in Dallas, more than an hour before game time, Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, was in the locker room grinding on the Stairmaster, surrounded by several reporters — their microphones deployed, heads tilted away to avoid flying droplets of sweat.

A reporter for The Dallas Morning News, who writes a blog, asked Mr. Cuban about a bruised Dirk Nowitzki, referring to the star power forward as a “warrior” for his willingness to play while injured.

“We’re not trading him to the Warriors,” said Mr. Cuban. “Bloggers might make that point.”

The comment was a bit of word play, but it illustrates how Mr. Cuban, a prolific blogger himself, feels about some of the bloggers who cover his team.

Last month Mr. Cuban sought to ban bloggers from the Mavericks’ locker room, but the National Basketball Association intervened, ruling that bloggers from credentialed news organizations must be admitted.

Mr. Cuban then decided to let in any blogger — “someone on Blogspot who has been posting for a couple weeks, kids blogging for their middle school Web site or those that work for big companies.”

Tension over sports blogging is one of the strains between sports franchises, leagues and reporters to have emerged during the digital age.

The dispute has grown lately between the press and organized sports over issues like how reporters cover teams, who owns the rights to photographs, audio and video that journalists gather at sports events, and whether someone who writes only blogs should be given access to the locker room.

The explosion of new media, especially with regard to advertising income, has made competitors out of two traditional allies — news media and professional sports.

A Web Shift in Way Advertisers Seek Clicks

2008-04-21T04:17:00.000-07:00

So far, the threat of a recession has not slowed the migration of ad dollars to the Internet, but the slowing economy might be changing where those dollars are being spent.Increasingly, marketers are looking to ad networks, which sell display advertising across groups of Web sites. Some networks offer targeted advertising; others, called vertical ad networks, include sites that focus on one subject, like travel or sports.

Their growth could mean a lower share of advertising for portals like AOL and particularly for Yahoo, which is particularly strong in traditional display advertising. (Yahoo will report its quarterly earnings on Tuesday.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21online.html?ex=1366516800&en=e188e7787b31f8ac&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

NBC helps teach digital reporting

2008-04-21T04:14:00.001-07:00

A crying need for training in digital technologies is one of the motivating forces for NBC’s new business venture, a partnership with the New York Film Academy.

Straying far afield from its core business of reporting the news, NBC News is getting into the education business.

Readers of media-related Web sites have been bombarded with ads promoting NBC News’s partnership with the New York Film Academy. In Los Angeles, billboards for the four-week, eight-week and one-year digital journalism training programs loom large, part of an aggressive ad campaign to spread the word before the first summer classes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21nbc.html?ex=1366516800&en=832b41d5fdbc98e0&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Divorce You Tube Style

2008-04-18T16:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/style/18divorce.html?ex=1366257600&en=48b74d9f06a61cbd&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

When the Ex Blogs, the Dirtiest Laundry Is Aired

New York Times - (4-18-08) - This week, the potential of the Internet to expose and disgrace when marriages fall apart came into stark relief as Tricia Walsh Smith, who is being divorced by Philip Smith, a theater executive, put a video on YouTube announcing that they never had sex, and yet she found him hoarding Viagra, pornography and condoms.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Smith’s lawyer, David Aronson, called the video “appalling” and said: “Mr. Smith is a very private person. This is obviously embarrassing.”

But in an era when more than one in 10 adult Internet users in the United States have blogs, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, many people are using the Web to tell their side of a marital saga. Despite the legal end of a marriage, the confessions can stretch toward eternity in a steady stream of enraged or despondent postings.

A Nation of Digital Nomads

2008-04-17T07:03:00.000-07:00

The current issue of the Economist covers the impact of technology on mobility and how we become a nation of nomads. The shift has a big impact on work, relationships and how we live our lives - both good and bad. Big implications here. These are things everyone has talked about for decades, but are now actually happening. It's not all positive and it will have a big impact on journalism moving forward. I recommend giving the package a read. - MT

AT THE Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student at the nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, opens her MacBook laptop computer and logs on to the café's wireless internet connection to study for her class on the legal treatment of sexual orientation. She is a regular here but doesn't usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads “Nomad, Nomad, Nomad, Nomad”. That says it all, she thinks. Permanently connected, she communicates by text, photo, video or voice throughout the day with her friends and family, and does her “work stuff” at the same time. She roams around town, but often alights at oases that cater to nomads.
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10950487&CFID=2545776&CFTOKEN=90249257

http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10950463&CFID=2545776&CFTOKEN=90249257

http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10950394&CFID=2545776&CFTOKEN=90249257

http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10950378&CFID=2545776&CFTOKEN=90249257

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11016402&CFID=2545776&CFTOKEN=90249257

Newspapers: No Future Without Changes

2008-04-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

Some of WashPost's Steven Pearlstein's thoughts:
* There is no way to save the industry as long as the people who own it insist on returning to the days of 20% profit margins.
* Those aiming to survive the coming shakeout can almost expect to have little or no profit over the next five to 10 years.
* Industry consolidation is not only necessary but desirable.
* Consolidation won't succeed in the long run if the efficiency gains aren't invested back into new technology, top talent and product improvement.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/04/16/ST2008041600949.html

Dirty Job, But Someone Has to Do It

2008-04-14T05:31:00.001-07:00

The Smoking Gun, the Web site that specializes in ferreting out embarrassing legal documents, is a happy byproduct of the digital revolution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14carr.html?ex=1365825600&en=6bcd691e1d7e796e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Censorship of Chinese Bloggers

2008-04-11T08:46:00.001-07:00

Chinese Bloggers vs. Censorship
Uploaded by tienchia

Local reporting shines in Texas

2008-04-11T08:10:00.000-07:00

(NYT) WHARTON, Tex. — The Tee Pee Motel here with its 10 adobe wigwams was up and running again after being closed for 23 years, and Bob Phillips, the Texas Country Reporter, was on it, barreling in with his television crew in his Ford Explorer daubed in the billowing red, white and blue of the Texas flag.

There were pressing questions. Who would buy a rundown 1942 motor court for $60,000 and put $1.6 million into renovating it? And did Geronimo’s great-grandson really show up recently in this old Jewish settlement town, birthplace of Dan Rather and Horton Foote, to stay there?

Not much escapes Mr. Phillips, 56, a Lone Star Charles Kuralt, who has logged more than 35 years on the state’s back roads and may be the most-traveled man in Texas, starting off as a gofer for a Dallas television station while he was a college freshman.

There are, by one gazetteer’s count, 8,438 populated places in Texas — many more than in California or New York — and the burly and affable Mr. Phillips knows them like few others. “We cannot find a town that we have not been in,” he said. “We have not produced a story in every one, but we have traveled through every one and been on every paved road in the state of Texas.”

Mr. Phillips’s half-hour programs already total more than 2,000 — about four times as many as his idol, Mr. Kuralt, produced for his CBS News segment “On the Road” from 1967 to 1980. They are broadcast weekly on 25 stations in Texas and afterward are beamed eight times a week on the rural satellite and cable network RFD-TV. The network, which started in 2000 and began carrying the revived “Imus in the Morning” show last December, reaches some 30 million households nationally.

The programs, usually composed of three stories each, include seven minutes of commercial time, which the Texas stations and Mr. Phillips split for sale to sponsors — in his case, companies like a farmers credit cooperative, a metal roofer and a sausage-maker.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/us/10texas.html?ex=1365566400&en=2ff68abcf5fa6f8d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Web Empowers Unhappy Customers

2008-04-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

The good news is that consumers no longer have to vent in a physically confrontational way. The computer keyboard has become a mighty sword — and invective, satire and parody provide the muscle. Thanks to the Internet, angry customers can get even while enjoying the community of fellow sufferers. BusinessWeek calls these tech-adept complainers, "consumer vigilantes."

It was Comcast's bad luck to antagonize Bob Garfield, a columnist for Advertising Age magazine. After failing to get service from the cable company, Garfield embarked on what he called a "consumer jihad." He launched an amusing Website, ComcastMustDie.com, where similarly frustrated consumers gather to share war stories.
The site features links to a podcast starring Mona "The Hammer Lady" Shaw — and a hilarious video spoof of a traumatized customer.

http://www.creators.com/opinion/froma-harrop.html?columnsName=fha

Journalism's Brave New World: Work 24/7 until you drop dead

2008-04-06T08:07:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO — They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/technology/06sweat.html?ex=1365220800&en=790cdfdaf4c1eb71&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

FInancial News Sites Videos Are So Bad

2008-04-06T07:19:00.000-07:00

Ha ha, your medium is dying! Financial-news print outlets seeking relevance have added video to their web sites. But their work is pretty much the opposite of YouTube gold. Brett Erlich, apparently just this guy who loves web videos, makes fun of the work of the Journal, Forbes, and Fortune on this criminally underwatched Current TV segment.

http://current.com/items/88872451_viral_video_film_school

What's Next for Magazines ?

2008-04-04T07:38:00.000-07:00

One of the sequences at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism with the largest number of majors is magazine journalism - what happens if magazines fade away?

The weekly newsmagazines have been declared dinosaurs as far back as the late 1980s. But now that 111 employees at Washington Post Co.'s Newsweek have taken buyouts, including many longtime editors, it's clear that their cultures are finally being blown up and reinvented. And some say that's not such a bad thing.Cable news and the Web have sapped Time and Newsweek of much of their audience in recent years, crowding out their exclusive hold on certain kinds of stories, including analyses and detailed retellings of major news events. As the Internet has also given rise to a new generation of multiplatform, self-branded news personalities. It no longer takes two decades at Newsweek to be a brand-name pundit.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120727766116988719.html

CC Chief Opposes Opening Up Existing Wireless Networks

2008-04-02T04:29:00.000-07:00

There is a struggle going at the FCC and in the boardrooms. Incumbents want to choke off competiton. What happens with wireless networks will be key to how news and information is delivered in the decade ahead.

From the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120707516225681007.html?apl=y&r=447827

LAS VEGAS -- Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin delighted wireless-company executives by announcing that he will oppose a petition to open up existing wireless networks to most outside devices.

Mr. Martin's opposition to a petition by eBay Inc.'s Skype unit is a disappointment for technology companies, which have been pressing the FCC to pry open existing networks so consumers can choose any kind of phone, wireless device or software that they want to use on them. Mr. Martin said Tuesday new regulation to open wireless networks wasn't necessary, since efforts by the FCC to urge carriers to open up their networks have already begun producing results.

Tech companies have lobbied heavily for the changes. "It is important to recognize that despite the wireless carriers' discussion of increasing openness, the existing wireless-handset marketplace for all consumers still remains closed," said Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition, a tech-industry group, in a prepared statement. Wireless companies weren't amused last year when Mr. Martin championed a proposal presented by Google Inc., which required some of the airwaves the FCC recently auctioned off to be open to outside wireless devices and software. Google initially bid $4.7 billion in the auction to ensure those rules took effect, then promptly dropped out of bidding.

YouTube Unplugged

2008-03-21T06:21:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, access to Google Inc.'s YouTube inside China was cut off after the Web site was flooded with graphic images from Tibet, including videos of burning trucks and monks being dragged through the streets by Chinese soldiers.

Blocking Western Web sites is routine in China, where the government has tightly controlled the flow of information. But the new YouTube blackout is the latest in a string of clashes between the site and foreign governments in Asia and the Middle East that's forcing the company to grapple with the consequences of its increasingly global reach.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt raised the issue in a meeting in Beijing with Cai Mingzhao, vice minister of the State Council Information Office, on Monday, the company said. The Council denied any knowledge of the blockage and promised to investigate, according to Google. On Thursday, YouTube remained inaccessible from China except to users who took extra technical steps to circumvent the ban.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120605651500353307.html

Letterman's 'Spitzer' Top Ten Phone Messages

2008-03-13T07:41:00.000-07:00

Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam

2008-03-13T07:35:00.000-07:00

Caution: Heavy Internet traffic ahead. Delays possible.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a technology conference in Boston sums up the angst: “The End of the Internet?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/technology/13net.html?ex=1363147200&en=e2913c1a462243bc&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Medill School Dean Talks About Future of Journalism

2008-03-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

NBC Chicago's Warner Saunders talks about the state of Chicago news organizations with the dean of the Medill School of Journalism, John Lavine. What is the best way to embrace changes in news business?

http://video.nbc5.com/player/?id=172462

http://video.nbc5.com/player/?id=172464

Blogs buzz about Spitzer's wife standing by her man

2008-03-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK -- When Silda Wall Spitzer stood beside her husband in ashen-faced misery the other day as the governor made his brief apology in the prostitution scandal, she uttered not a word. Yet she launched a thousand conversations.

"Why is she standing there?" many women wondered. "Should she be? Would I be?"

And for many, who've seen a long line of wronged political spouses do the same, from Hillary Clinton to Dina Matos McGreevey to Suzanne Craig, the immediate answer was a resounding, "Hell, no."

"I watched her and I thought, 'Again, the wife is standing there,' " said Jessica Thorpe, a 38-year-old mother of three in Larchmont, N.Y. "And I had a visceral reaction. I just don't get it. Why does it always have to be that way in politics? What will she get out of standing there?"

The blogosphere was buzzing, too. "Why do they show up?" asked blogger Amy Ephron on huffingtonpost.com. She proposed her own fantasy: "I just want one of them -- Hillary, Silda -- to stand on the steps of the White House, the governor's mansion, and stamp their foot and say, 'And another thing, I'm keeping the house.' "

Yet many women also understood that Silda Spitzer was in pain, and in the unforgiving glare of the public spotlight. So while Donna Webster, a product-development executive in Boston, wished the New York governor had been forced to face the music alone, she also empathized with his wife's choice, which she assumed was for the sake of her three daughters.

"I cringed when I saw her next to him," said Webster, 59. "I think he should have taken it like a man -- without her."
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/national_world/stories/2008/03/12/spitzer_spouses.ART_ART_03-12-08_A2_I79K87P.html?sid=101

Upton Sinclair, Now Playing on YouTube

2008-03-12T05:53:00.000-07:00

AN undercover vegan wired with a camera no bigger than a sugar cube spent six weeks last fall working at a Southern California slaughterhouse. To fit in, he brought sandwiches made with soy riblets and ate them in a dusty parking lot with the other workers.

He tried not to worry about the emotional toll that long days escorting cows to the kill might have. He had more practical concerns, like whether the camera switch hidden in his pocket would fail or a cow would smash into him and crack the recording equipment taped to his body.

The Humane Society of the United States first gave a 32-minute video made from his footage to the San Bernardino County district attorney, then in January released an edited version on its Web site and to a newspaper. The video showed workers flipping sick dairy cows with forklifts, prodding them with electricity and dragging them with chains to be processed into ground meat, some of which likely ended up in chili and tacos at public school cafeterias.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/dining/12animal.html?ex=1363060800&en=01642d2f9c8b66f2&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Watching TV Without A Set - Is News Next?

2008-03-10T05:53:00.000-07:00

Watching television online is now a common activity for millions, with one in four Internet users watching a full-length show online in the last three months. A study in October by Nielsen Media Research found that one in four Internet users had streamed full-length television episodes online in the last three months, including 39 percent of people ages 18 to 34 and, more surprisingly, 23 percent of those 35 to 54.

Some people pay for episodes via Apple’s iTunes Store and Amazon’s Unbox service, but many more appear to be watching streams of free, advertising-supported episodes on Web sites. In a closely watched effort, NBC Universal and the News Corporation are about to introduce their joint streaming site, called Hulu.

One piece of good news for the networks and advertisers is that viewers are more likely to remember ads on the Internet versions of TV shows, partly because the commercials are less numerous and more demographically aimed online, according to many studies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/technology/10online.html?ex=1362888000&en=40d7dd51427c1a46&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Apple Goes After Blackberry with I-phone

2008-03-07T07:34:00.000-08:00

Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone

2008-03-06T09:31:00.000-08:00

PARIS — Social networks may be nothing new to habitués of the Internet. Several years of competition among Facebook, MySpace and Friendster have generated tens of millions of members.

But now the market is teeming with companies that want to bring the same phenomenon to the cellphone. There are so many “mobile social networking” upstarts, in fact, that when New Media Age magazine in Britain tried to identify the “ones to watch,” it ended up naming 10 companies.

Some of those in the thick of battle are resigned to having a lot of company. “If there weren’t competitors, there wouldn’t be a market,” said Dan Harple, founder and chief executive of GyPSii, a mobile social network based in Amsterdam that is a contender. “Maybe there are 30 or more now — in three years, there will be 5 that matter.”http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/technology/06wireless.html?ex=1362459600&en=571b09dc85db259d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Online journalists defy Cuban censors

2008-03-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

HAVANA — A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly.

Mr. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Mr. Alarcón’s reputation in some circles.

Cuban officials have long limited the public’s access to the Internet and digital videos, tearing down unauthorized satellite dishes and keeping down the number of Internet cafes open to Cubans. Only one Internet cafe remains open in Old Havana, down from three a few years ago. Yet the government’s attempts to control access are increasingly ineffective. Young people here say there is a thriving black market giving thousands of people an underground connection to the world outside the Communist country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/world/americas/06cuba.html?ex=1362546000&en=eff6155b2c2d280d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

After Suicide, Blog Insults Are Debated

2008-03-03T06:30:00.000-08:00

Visitors to AgencySpy and AdScam, two sharp-tongued advertising industry blogs, posted comments blaming the sites for contributing to ad executive Paul Tilley’s suicide.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/business/media/03blog.html?ex=1362286800&en=e7a71b80533f926f&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

CNN launches new site dedicated to user generated content

2008-03-02T15:44:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month, CNN launched a new site dedicated to user-generated content that is unmoderated -- basically, a news version of YouTube. The site, currently in "beta" or test mode, can be viewed at iReport.com.

From the site: "Use the tools you find here to share and talk about the news of your world, whether that's video and photos of the events of your life, or your own take on what's making international headlines. Or, even better, a little bit of both. With this site, we want to share our passion about the news in a way that invites you -- and everyone else -- to share your passion about the news. At CNN we live for news. We love talking about it. And we know that there's a whole lot more to it than what you see on TV or read on your favorite Web site. So we've launched an independent world where you, the iReport.com community, tell the stories we're not used to seeing. And the most compelling, important, and urgent ones may get seen on CNN. So head on over the homepage and jump in. Tell your story and see how it connects to someone on the other side of the world -- and build a new kind of news site, one made from communities of shared interests, impassioned discussions and great storytelling.http://beta.ireport.com/home/index.jspa

Humane Society Sues U.S. In Cattle Case

2008-03-02T08:15:00.001-08:00

WASHINGTON — The Humane Society of the United States sued the Agriculture Department on Wednesday for creating a “loophole” that it said is permitting potentially sick cows into the food supply.The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, accused the department of violating procedural requirements when it created the provision, giving the meat industry a financial incentive to send unhealthy cattle to slaughter. As evidence, the Humane Society cited its widely publicized undercover videotape of workers at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, Calif., abusing cows that appeared unable to walk.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/business/28beef.html?ex=1361941200&en=ab2da1cef4eae353&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Blogger uncovers plagiarism by Bush Aide

2008-03-01T07:32:00.000-08:00

NYT — A longtime aide to President Bush who wrote occasional guest columns for his hometown newspaper resigned on Friday evening after admitting that he had repeatedly plagiarized from other writers. A blogger in Mr. Goeglein’s hometown, Fort Wayne, Ind., found the plagiarism. The aide, Tim Goeglein, had worked for Mr. Bush since 2001, as a liaison to social and religious conservatives, an important component of the president’s political base. Mr. Goeglein was influential in decisions on a range of questions important to that constituency, including stem cell research, abortion and faith-based initiatives.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/us/01aide.html?ex=1362114000&en=48d1be0b6cd4fcf2&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Fighting a False Email Rumor

2008-02-29T07:29:00.000-08:00

NYT- Prof. Jeremy D. Popkin returned to his office at the University of Kentucky on Feb. 19 after teaching a lesson about Vichy France in his course on the Holocaust. During its 30 years on the curriculum, the class has grown perpetually popular, with 60 applicants vying for half as many seats. The university has even created a Judaic Studies program.

Yet, when Professor Popkin opened his e-mail that day, he was informed that his class did not exist. “This week, the University of Kentucky removed the Holocaust from its school curriculum,” the message stated, “because it offended the Muslim population, which claims it never occurred.” All faculty members’ e-mail addresses from the history department were listed among the message’s recipients.

Over the past year, faculty members and administrators at the university’s main campus in Lexington have collectively received thousands of e-mail messages like this one, repeating the same baseless accusation — that pressure from Muslims had led the university to drop its Holocaust course. Like many who have sent these messages, the writer added her own preface to the one that appeared in Professor Popkin’s mailbox, writing in part: “I cannot see how you faculty can go to work each day and face a generation of young adults that will be lied to even more than my generation. What next? Are we going to rewrite the facts of 9/11 so that they fit the Middle Eastern beliefs? This is simply shameful, and I am disgusted by it.”http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/education/27education.html?ex=1361854800&en=87ab0405bbbb1d64&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

How to Skip Out on Your Debts

2008-02-29T07:02:00.000-08:00

It's a novel idea - help somebody dump their home mortgage - for a fee.

A new online business is assisting people who want to walk away from mortgages. The homeowners say they can't afford to pay. It is called You Walk Away.com. http://www.youwalkaway.com/.

Many homeowners aren't looking back. This poses dire consequences for the U.S. economy if the trend continues. Goldman Sachs economists estimate that as much as $3 trillion in mortgages could be underwater by the end of the year, leaving 30% of the country's outstanding mortgages in negative equity.

Since the Depression, American government policy has encouraged homeownership as an absolute good. It protects people from increases in rent and allows them to build equity as they pay off their mortgages.

But in the worst economic housing downturn since the Great Depression, homeowners are walking away from properties in record numbers. As home prices plummet, growing numbers of borrowers are winding up owing more on their homes than the homes are worth. With little or no equity in the properties these homeowners are walking away and turning the keys back to lenders.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120424677934501611.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/us/29walks.html?ex=1362027600&en=b722121e091a02bb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink