Author Archives: Karl

Tim Porter Calls It

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First Draft by Tim Porter: Shark Bites Citizen Journalism

Stick a fork in it. “Citizen Journalism,” as the moniker describing John and Jane Q’s ability to create their own media, is done. The shark has been jumped.

I was at the gym this afternoon trying to reverse the effects of a late night of Dewars and dancing at the local rock n’ roll saloon, done to the tunes of a Stones tribute band (love the wigs, lads!) and all in a celebration of a good pal’s 40th birthday, when one of the TV screens hanging above the treadmills filled with the words, in all caps, CITIZEN JOURNALISM. CNN was asking viewers to email in photos and videos of Hurricane Dennis. (Here’s a spot on CNN’s web site asking for the same thing without the “citizen journalism” phrase.

…”Citizen journalism” as a concept
is still being defined. At its base, though, are the acts of
participation in coverage and creation of media. On a higher level, it
involves a new definition of news and a realignment of the relationship between reporter and community.

The victims of terrorism in the London underground became reporters
when they felt compelled to capture the scene that surrounded them and
communicate with those outside of it. No one needed to suggest that
they do it. The urgency of the moment and the capability of the technology combined to make it happen. It was an inevitable collision.

What happened in London was reporting. I learn something. I tell it
to you. It’s also empowering because those bloodied and soot-blackened
commuters took control of some of coverage by creating it themselves.
As I said the other day: Terrorism made them victims; technology made them reporters.

I’m pretty sure what “citizen journalism” is not is CNN soliciting photographs from viewers and then putting a few of them on its web site. It’s more like the visual equivalent of the man-on-the-street story. Maybe what CNN is doing should be called “postcard journalism.” Am I being too cynical?

Not too cynical. But read my earlier post – you might be an ambulance chaser .

Citizen Journalists – Ambulance Chasers?

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For ambulance-chasing bloggers, tragedy equals opportunity | The Register

No human disaster these days is complete without two things, both of which can be guaranteed to surface within 24 hours of the event.

First, virus writers will release a topical new piece of malware. And then weblog evangelists proclaim how terrific the catastrophe is for the internet. It doesn’t seem to matter how high the bodies are piled – neither party can be deterred from its task.

For the technology evangelists, the glee is barely containable. The daily business of congratulating each other jumps to a whole new level with all the bloggers marveling in unison at their ability to detail real-time tragedy.

Shelley Powers had this to say:

Orlowskihas a good point: is a tragedy more ‘real’ just because it’s traversed routers? Do we need to see 500 instances of the same photo, scraped from TV, to validate our experiences? Do we need to have a thousand
pundits start bashing each other about causes, while the bodies are still being carried out? Must we link to each other with breathless exclamations of “so and so� has the latest “breaking� news on the story — followed by some outlandish rumor? (Do webloggers know how silly it is to write such things in their weblogs? Or are links worth the cost to their dignity?)

More importantly, why do we have to go through this validation ritual every time events happen?

I’m afraid that Orlowski is going to be disappointed in me, because I’m going to indulge in a bit of writing about an event, and it does fall within his 24 hour mark. No, I’m not going to write about the London bombs: I’m going to write about Hurricane Dennis. I know that some would consider doing so a Cable Cliche, whatever that means. But Missouri has a lot riding on this storm; not as much as some states, but a lot. And I’m not writing news, I’m telling a story.

Me? I think it’s much a do about nothing really. I said this earlier: “Events, both tragic and joyous, drive us to share our experience – to share our reality – it’s what people do.” The net changes nothing in this respect. It’s simply providing us new ways to do so. Ways that bypass filters that have existed for the last fifty years or so – and to a greater audience than before. It is not changing human nature – but providing us new avenues for expressing it.

A Journalist Who Thinks Judy Miller Should Go to Jail

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Attytood: Why this journalist thinks that Judy Miller should go to jail

…what if the “source” that Miller (and Cooper) have been protecting may have committed a serious crime, naming an undercover CIA agent and possibly even exposing her to fatal consequences, as happened when American spies were “outed” in the 1970s. In the “slippery slope” argument, those facts are irrelevant. If Judy Miller goes to jail today, under this thinking, it makes it more likely for a good and honest journalist who’s on the brink of exposing true corruption to be jailed tomorrow.

Today, we realized that the “slippery slope” argument is wrong, and so were we. We’re not happy that Judy Miller is going to jail, but we think — in this case — that if she won’t cooperate with the grand jury, then it’s the right thing.

That’s because Judy Miller’s actions in recent years — a pattern that includes this case — have been the very antithesis of what we think journalism is and should be all about. Ultimately, the heart and soul of real journalism is not so much protecting “sources” at any cost. It is, rather, living up to the 19th Century maxim set forth by Peter Finley Dunne, that journalists should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

That is why the ability of reporters to keep the identity of their true sources confidential is protected by shield laws in 31 states and the District of Columbia (although not in federal courts). Without such protections, the government official would not be able to report the wrongdoing of a president (remember “Deep Throat,” the ultimate confidential source?), nor would the corporate executive feel free to rat out a crooked CEO. The comfortable and corrupt could not be afflicted.

But the Times’ Judy Miller has not been afflicting the comfortable. She has been protecting them, advancing their objectives, and helping them to mislead a now very afflicted American public. In fact, thinking again about Watergate and Deep Throat is a good way to understand why Judy Miller should not be protected today. Because in Watergate, a reporter acting like Miller would not be meeting the FBI’s Mark Felt in an underground parking garage. She would be obsessively on the phone with H.R. Haldeman or John Dean, listening to malicious gossip about Carl Bernstein or their plans to make Judge Sirica look bad.

“Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality – no one in America is”

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So says Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald investigating the Valerie Plame identity leak affair.

For my friends who have no idea what this is about. A quick review.

1. Joseph C.Wilson was a U.S. ambassador assigned to investigate Iraq-Niger WMD production claims. He reported he found none. When President Bush, later in his State of the Union address claimed there were, Wilson went public.

2. Shortly after, his wife Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative, had her identity leaked to CNN personality Robert Novak – who revealed it in a newspaper column. It is believed that the revealing of her identity was in retaliation for his going public.

3. Revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative is illegal. An investigation has begun into who leaked her identity to Novak and to other journalists across the country, notably Judy Miller at the New York Times and Time Magazine’s Matthew Cooper.

4. Time Magazine’s Matthew Cooper has helped reveal his source as George Bush’s primary politcal advisor Karl Rove. Judy Miller, refusing to reveal her source, and has since been sent to jail. Article at the Guardian.

Jay Rosen thinks it’s Time for Robert Novak to Feel Some Chill

I, for one, have had it with Robert Novak. And if all the journalists who are talking today about “chilling effects” and individual conscience mean what they say, they will, as a matter of conscience and pride, start giving Novak himself the big chill.

That means if you’re a Washington columnist maybe you don’t go on CNN with him– until he explains. If you’re a newspaper editor you consider suspending his column until he explains. If you’re Jonathan Klein, president of CNN/US, you take him off the air until he decides to go on the air and explain. If you’re John Barron, editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, you suspend your columnist (with pay, I should think); and if Barron won’t do it then publisher John Cruickshank should.

If Novak says he can’t talk until the case is over, then he shouldn’t be allowed to publish or opine on the air until the case is over. He should know the rage some of his colleagues feel. Claiming to be “baffled” by Novak’s behavior may have been plausible for a while. With reporter Judith Miller now sitting in jail, and possibly facing criminal charges later, “baffled” is sounding lame.

After the decision yesterday someone asked Bill Keller, top editor of the New York Times, if this was really a whistle-blowing case. Keller answered: “you go to court with the case you’ve got.” I understood what he meant, but that answer was incomplete.

For in certain ways the case that sent Judy Miller to jail is about a classic whistler blower: diplomat Joseph C. Wilson. Those “two senior administration officials” in Novak’s column had a message for him: stick your neck out and we’ll stick it to your wife. (They did: her career as an operative is over.) Might that have some chilling effect?

For more on the consequences of Mathew Cooper revealing his sources read this commentary. via dangerousmeta.

Reading “Free Culture”

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I have finally gotten around to reading Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and was struck, considering the events in London of the past few days, by the following:

When two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field, all media around the world shifted to this news. Every moment of just about every day for that week, and for weeks after, television in particular, and media generally, retold the story of the events we had just witnessed. The telling was a retelling, because we had seen the events that were described. The genius of this awful act of terrorism was that the delayed second attack was perfectly timed to assure that the whole world would be watching.

These retellings had an increasingly familiar feel. There was music scored for the intermissions, and fancy graphics that flashed across the screen. There was a formula to interviews. There was “balance”, and seriousness. This was news choreographed in the way we have increasingly come to expect it, “news as entertainment”, even if the entertainment is tragedy.

But in addition to this produced news about the “tragedy of September 11,” those of us tied to the Internet came to see a very different production as well. The Internet was filled with accounts of the same events. Yet these Internet accounts had a very different flavor. Some people constructed photo pages that captured images from around the world and presented them as slide shows with text. Some offered open letters. There were sound recordings. There was anger and frustration. There were attempts to provide context. There was, in short, an extraordinary worldwide barn raising, in the sense Mike Godwin uses the term in his book Cyber Rights, around a news event that had captured the attention of the world. There was ABC and CBS, but there was also the Internet.

I don’t mean simply to praise the Internet – though I do think the people who supported this form of speech should be praised. I mean instead to point to a significance in this form of speech. For like a Kodak, the Internet enables people to capture images. And like in a movie by a student on the “Just Think!” bus, the visual images could be mixed with sound or text.

But unlike any technology for simply capturing images, the Internet allows these creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people, practically instantaneously. This is something new in our tradition – not just that culture can be captured mechanically, and obviously not just that events are commented upon critically, but that this mix of captured images, sound, and commentary can be widely spread practically instantaneously.

The book is over a year old. Events, both tragic and joyous, drive us to share our experience – to share our reality – it’s what people do. The net is providing new tools to do so.

Rev. Fred Phelps: “Thank God for the bombing of London’s subway today”

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I’m sorry to link to this – but the only way to respond to hatred is to expose it to as many as possible.

Godhatesfags.com:

Thank God for the bombing of London’s subway today – July 7, 2005 – wherein dozens were killed and hundreds seriously injured. Wish it was many more. “But thou shalt say unto them, This is a nation that obeyeth not the voice of the Lord their God, nor receiveth correction; truth is perished, and is cut off from their mouth.” Jer. 7:28. England: Island of the Sodomite Damned

via: Think Progress

Era of the great comic book movies at an end

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Judging reviews of “Fantastic Four”, which will bomb, and by the reviews of “Elektra”, I predict we’ll be seeing less comic book movies being produced. Makes me sad. Hollywood seems to be thinking that movies simply based on comic books, while giving their characters no respect, will sell. They won’t. I’m not going.

I will be going to see “Batman Returns” today however. I think it would be ironic if DC based characters suddenly made a comeback by taking into account the real lessons of success for Spiderman and X-Men – heroes are three dimensional.