a curious Yankee in Europe's court

Wales journalist Ed Walker has an informative post on his blog about some of the legal issues online journalists now encounter (“Legal challenges facing online journalists” Sept 16, 2010).

Excerpt:

The web is moving quickly and with certain acts dating back to to the last century, you won’t find mention of Facebook in the legal statements. First things first, if you’re unsure about media law…

Read full post here. The comments are also helpful.

Last night over dinner with friends, one of them expressed her bewilderment about what the purpose of data journalism is precisely. And, she lamented, doesn’t it just make things worse by overwhelming us with information that most of us won’t ever read or watch?

A couple of us pitched right in and tried our best to explain and defend this fast growing development in new media, one that Wikileaks has thrust into star position in the news cycle recently.  We didn’t make much headway, I’m sorry to say. So I was especially happy today to find an article online that offers a bunch of help for the next time such a dinner table debate ensues.

It’s a terrific interview that Nieman Journalism Lab did — video and transcript — with the editor of the Data Blog for the Guardian (“How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools” by Jonathan Stray, Aug 5, 2010). The interview is thorough and in depth — with a lot of show and tell. And if it doesn’t supply you just about all you might want to know about the potential uses and service of data journalism, I’d be surprised.

Excerpt:

The technology involved is surprisingly simple, and mostly free. The Guardian uses public, read-only Google Spreadsheets to share the data they’ve collected, which require no special tools for viewing and can be downloaded in just about any desired format. Visualizations are mostly via Many Eyes and Timetric, both free.

Surprisingly for many like my friend last night, the raw data the newspaper is posting online is getting some impressive traffic, according to the Guardian editor:

“… a million hits a month during the recent election coverage.”

Read and watch the full Nieman interview here.

Can the question of “Are we seeing anything new?” in relation to this week’s huge Wikileaks Afghan documents story also be applied to journalism itself?

The answer is yes, according to journalism professor C.W. Anderson writing in a post yesterday for Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab website (“Data, diffusion, impact: Five big questions the Wikileaks story raises about the future of journalism” July 26, 2010).

Excerpt:

The release of the Wikileaks stories yesterday was a classic case study of the new ecosystem of news diffusion. More complex than the usual stereotype of “journalists report, bloggers opine,” in the case the Wikileaks story we got to see a far more nuanced (and, I would say, far more real) series of news decisions unfold: from new fact-gatherers, to news organizations in a different position in the informational chain, all the way to the Twittersphere in which conversation about the story was occurring in real-time, back to the bloggers, the opinion makers, the partisans, the politicians, and the hacks. This is how news works in 2010;

Anderson goes on to point out how the three major newspapers breaking the Wikileaks documents story — New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel — each talked in a different way about the Wikileaks data. And he identifies the emergence of something new in journalism (read post here).

Definitely fascinating reading.

The first thing Frédéric Filloux tells us in his blog post Sunday about a recent study on “digital natives” (scroll down) is that “they see life as a game.” (“Understanding the Digital Natives” Monday Note.com, July 25, 2010).

Filloux summarizes the findings of French polling agency BVA in a study it conducted recently on the digital habits of hundreds of 18-24 year-olds.

Excerpt:

The way a Digital Native see his (or, once for all “her“) environment is deeply shaped by computer games. “When he is buying something”, says Edouard Le Marechal who engineered the survey, “finding the best bargain is a process as important as acquiring the good…

Filloux provides a link to the original BVA study report (in French).

I found the link to the post by Filloux at editorsweblog.org in a blog post by Dawn Osakue yesterday (Digital Natives versus brand elite?  July 26, 2010). Okakue offers further details about the digital native group.

If you want to change the world, as they say, and still don’t understand how important social media (Twitter, Facebook et al) is as a primary tool, then you might want to watch this short video featuring digital strategist, Cheryl Contee.

Contee was speaking at the Netroots Nation conference (ending today) in Las Vegas. She highlights some important statistics about who’s using social networking media, and offers a few powerful dos and do nots for social activists and organizations.

For example, Contee explains why now “there is no digital divide.”

Though the conference is USA focused, the info about Twitter and Facebook is applicable across the globe.

Although the paying-members-only policy recently enacted by The Times in the UK reportedly has caused online readership to plummet 90 percent (see here), it’s still too early to declare the experiment a dead duck, according to a blog post by Peter Robins, media and technology editor at rival UK newspaper the Guardian (“The paywall won’t be built in a day” July 22, 2010).

Robins writes that it would be “very unwise” to conclude that Times‘ publisher Rupert Murdoch’s paywall has failed. As argument, he raises the analogy of another Murdoch publication behind a paywall, the quite successful Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

The Wall Street Journal acquired its million online subscribers by following a consistent strategy for a decade…

Robins cautiously predicts that a definitive answer about the success or failure of the Times‘ paywall (if continued) won’t emerge for six months or more.

Robins does omit mentioning that the WSJ is primarily a financial newspaper and — like the Financial Times that also operates successfully behind a paywall — has a select subscriber base that reportedly is quite willing to pay for the speciality of business and finance news (see here).

Earlier post on Times’ paywall here.

With more than 136 million European users (as of April 2010),  Facebook’s popularity in Europe is evident, according to InsideFacebook.com (“Who’s Using Facebook Around the World?” June 8, 2010).

Total penetration for Europe now stands at a respectable 21.1% with a total audience of 136,549,060 Facebook users…

And this popularity echoes a worldwide trend. More than 70 percent of Facebook users are outside the U.S., according to the New York Times. That would be 70 percent of a total of 500 million users that Facebook reports it now has on board, according to a flood of news reports this week.

I would be willing to bet that most Facebook users — though aging, still predominantly ages 13 to 34 — don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the man, Mark Zuckerberg, who’s behind the website that stars in their daily lives. But others do, especially privacy advocates, and some critics and enemies Zuckerberg gained along the way to his astounding success.

Recently Zuckerberg answered some questions about himself and Facebook in an interview that was broadcast last night on ABC Television. Related story here (“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Talks to Diane Sawyer as Website Gets 500-Millionth Member” by Ki Mae Heussner, July 21, 2010).

Yesterday a friend tried to send me a copy of an article in the Times, the UK newspaper that is now secreted behind a paywall, its online content available to paid subscribers only.

The article, so my friend wrote, was an interview with someone whose life story reminded her of a personal situation I had discussed with her recently. So, being a good friend, she took the trouble of scanning the article into an email for me.

Unfortunately some technical glitch messed it up, and all I got was html code instead of text. I asked her to try again and I’m waiting for the re-send.

In the meantime, in spite of knowing about the paywall, I clicked on the Times website to search for the article. Immediately, up popped a page saying either pay us or go bye bye.

Annoyance compounded! How do I mean this? Months ago when I read about media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s insistence that his News Corp newspapers be swaddled behind a paywall, I felt vaguely, though truly, annoyed by what seems to me a clear outbreak of Ludditus

But yesterday, I felt a personal sting from this imposition by Murdoch that access to information be only available to those able to pay. It feels a violation of what more and more seems to be a crucial human right — open access to a free flow of information. And, furthermore, the idea that a simple paywall can restore profits in today’s complex media-scape of vast options doesn’t seem probable.

Newspaper paywalls (I hope!) are futile wishful thinking for the claustrophobic old days when circulation and audience markets were sitting ducks. Readers and viewers were imprisoned by a relatively small number of news and entertainment outlets — it was quite awful for those of us who were there and remember.

So I perked up today when I came across an interview with Internet technologies expert Clay Shirky in the Guardian (“Clay Shirky: ‘Paywall will underperform – the numbers don’t add up’” by Decca Aitkenhead, July 5, 2010). I noted especially the following segment:

Rupert Murdoch has just begun charging for online access to the Times – and Shirky is confident the experiment will fail.

“Everyone’s waiting to see what will happen with the paywall – it’s the big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial calculation, I don’t think the numbers add up.” But then, interestingly, he goes on, “Here’s what worries me about the paywall. When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they’re critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn’t want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times.”

I like that last sentence so much, I want to pluck it out and highlight it again:

In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times.

Raise your hand if you want to be locked out, again.

UPDATE – July 20, 2010: “Murdoch’s First Newspaper Paywall Not Off to a Great Start” by Henry Blodget, Huffington Post

In their own words

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain both gave interviews in July that the respective publications published verbatim in a Q&A format.

• John McCain spoke to New York Times reporters here (“The Times Interviews John McCain” with Adam Nagourney and Michael Cooper, July 13, 2008).
• Barack Obama spoke to a reporter for The Jerusalem Post in Israel on July 24 here (“Obama on Iran, Syria, and Jerusalem” by David Horovitz, July 26, 2008).

Wars and winners

But no one really wins a war, according to WW II veteran, historian and Boston University Professor Howard Zinn, who wrote an Op-Ed for the Boston Globe recently scolding Obama and McCain for fueling their campaigns with way too much war talk. (“Memo to Obama, McCain: No one wins in a war” July 17, 2008).

Some polls more interesting than others…

An AP-Yahoo News poll has been tracking the responses of the same 2000 people since last November in surveys focused on measuring how they feel about what’s happening in politics, according to the news outlets. A recent finding: one candidate (guess who?) is generating more loyalty and enthusiasm from his supporters than the other (“Poll: McCain’s backers less fired up than Obama’s” by Alan Fram, AP, July 2008).

And some fall prey to the whims of editors

Who knows why, but editors at two major news outlets in the U.S. manipulated the reporting of a recent poll they conducted “withholding from their first release results favorable to Sen. Barack Obama,” according to the watchdog organization Media Matters (“ABC News/Wash. Post withheld results of poll favorable to Obama” July 17, 2008).

Did they really think we wouldn’t find out? And I wonder, Still I wonder — … (lyrics here):

Fascinating peek back in time

Want to hear what Obama had to say before he was the Presidential candidate he is today? For Obama-watchers, it may be intriguing to read this in-depth interview he gave to Men’s Vogue way back in 2006 (“The Path to Power” by Jacob Weisberg, Sept 2006).

Countdowns…

Days until the 2008 Democratic National Convention — 24. Days until the Republican National Convention — 30.

(See here for previous round-up)

Will there be more room for women’s voices with the digital revolution of news media that is underway online? Yes, and the increase already exists, according to a recent study that found that women make up half of all bloggers.

Perhaps this means good things for improving the status of women as a result of the ongoing weakening of the MSM “gatekeeper” that often still continues to bar women from serious opinion pages, and frequently ignores them in favor of the male when an expert comment is needed. Read about this and more here.
(“Do We Still Need Feminist Media?” by L.S. Kim, Ms. Magazine, Posted November 9, 2007 – Alternet.org)