US newspaper leaders are holding a more or less secret emergency summit where they discuss (again!) fun topics such as how to charge for news online and demand money from Google. James Warren chooses historical summit analogies carefully:
One hopes it displays the same sense of purpose as, say, troubled world leaders did at Yalta in 1945 or, in a rather less respectable sector of the economy, beleaguered mob bosses did at a legendary Apalachin, New York, confab in 1957.
Tim Berners-Lee: Demand raw data. For science, but also for journalism.
Det er helg, og godt å se på andre arbeide!
(Foto: George Eastman Houses samling på Flickr Commons. Ingen kjente opphavsrettsrestriksjoner.)
Se alle brekksaker.
Du bist Terrorist from lexela on Vimeo.
This is very impressive work. As Robin Meyer-Lucht says, why don’t we see more such use of videos by professional news organizations?
But I also think the narrator comes close to demagoguery here. For example, the EU data retention directive, which is targeted in the first part, is restricted to traffic data. That can be bad enough in itself, but does not mean that data on which web pages you visited will be potentially available to the police. That’s a difference, and a very important one. The video also moves seamlessly from that directive to the German BKA law about online surveillance, which is not exactly the same. Activists should get their facts right as well. There’s a discussion about this over at Spreeblick.
To be fair, the Du bist Terrorist website does have links to media stories where the facts are presented correctly.
Monday next week, editors and journalists meet in Hamburg to agree on (they use “ratify” in the press release, ok) a new European charter for press freedom:
The charter formulates principles for the freedom of the press/media from government interference – in particular for their right to safety from surveillance, electronic eavesdropping and searches of editorial departments and computers, and unimpeded access for journalists and citizens to all domestic and foreign sources of information.
After having researched various national and European plans for online surveillance and data retention lately, I have to support this — though I think the media should fight for all citizens’ rights at the same time.
Journalists have to start taking encryption techniques and anonymity online seriously, to protect themselves and above all their sources. I wonder how many media people and news organizations have even thought about this yet.
Andrew DeVigal (photo: Gaute Singstad, Nordiske Mediedager).
Before it gets way too old, the rest of my notes from last week’s Bergen media conference (note to self: stop taking paper notes, buy that mini laptop you’ve been thinking about for a long time). About multimedia at the NYT, a journalist using blogging as a tool in a Danish business scandal, and Adrian Holovaty on EveryBlock.
When I studied political science, the four quadrant chart was used so much that it became always laughable, you made jokes with them. But it’s a simple, powerful, ockhamesque tool, something Josh Young demonstrates in a blog post about different kinds of structuring information in journalism (via Jay Rosen’s flying seminar). Taking Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo as a case study in how a subject can be treated broadly in shallow “containers”, Young to me comes up with an excellent description on how the blog can be used to produce high quality journalism — efficiently:
Each dispatch isn’t comprehensive. They catch the reader up on past reporting with a few links to previous posts. Or they start off with a link or two to others’ posts or articles, promising to pick up the issue where they left off. Then they take a deep look at a small set of questions, teasing out contradictions, and end up with a set of conclusions or a new, more pointed set of questions for the next post. The point is that the containers are small-shallow in the sense that they’re often only exposing a few dots at a time and not necessarily always trying to connect them all up as they go along. These posts don’t feign omniscience the way some, though certainly not all, traditional journalistic pieces do; they admit doubt and highlight confusion. The goal is to isolate facts, issues, and relationships, not always synthesize them. But a critical characteristic of the form is that Josh Marshall’s dispatches on fired USAs compose a series. Each post extends previous ones or adds more to the same canvas. They’re all part of some bigger picture; they’re cumulative. And that is why, taken together, they amount to journalism that’s broad in subject.
Bonus link: A profile of Josh Marshall contains this gem on blog-based journalism’s business model:
Begin as a tiny operation. Manage to gain a following. As the audience grows, ask readers for donations and accept advertising. As the advertising and donations grow, add reporters and features. Repeat as often as needed.
This is something I would like to copy. Maybe here.
Some links and things noted during sessions at a media conference in Bergen today:
The Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger aimed to dissolve the dichotomy between old and new school journalism. The investigative reporter, the roving reporter are still needed, but get crucial assistance from the knowledgeable & networked public. Examples: The coverage of complex tax evasion strategies by big corporations, where experts helped interpret and leak essential information. And the Ian Tomlinson story during the G20 summit protests was a good example of crowdsourcing. The tech department got help creating a list of IT mergers & acquisitions. Rusbridger also outed himself as a Twitter fan, showing one of The Guardian’s own reporters as an ultra-twitterer with over 11.000 followers. Each reporter should build their own community, he said. Finally he mentioned impressive traffic growth for the Comment is free subsite.
Espen Andersen from the NRK talked about computer-assisted journalism. He has created a tutorial (in Norwegian) on how to use screenscraping software (here RoboMaker). There is some movement and growing interest around this type of innovative journalism in Norway now.
Several people are microblogging from Bergen. Watch for #nmd.
An editorial in the Financial Times speaks out very clearly against the planned extension by the EU parliament of copyright on recorded music from 50 to 95 years (via Hax):
Copyright extension is, in the main, just the well-known strategy of powerful companies: profit-grabbing through lobbying for state protection. That is bad enough. Worse is the chilling effect it can have on creativity: the industry is already on a legal crusade against the sampling of copyrighted material into new original work. This is like the Grimm brothers’ descendants suing Disney for using their fairy tales. The cultural industries are over-protected. If cultural works were less greedily hoarded, consumers would enjoy more variety – and artists would create more freely.
(Scandinavian readers: See blog post about Lawrence Lessig on this topic and more on internet policy).
UPDATE: The 95 years proposal is off the table, according to Dagens Nyheter. Instead an increase to 70 years will be voted on in the EU parliament on April 23rd as a compromise. Some MEPs will also propose not to increase at all, among them the Swede Christofer Fjellner.
UPDATE II: The majority in the EP voted for the 70 years proposal. The law must also be adopted by the EU Council.
Evgeny Morozov’s Net Effect blog has quickly become one of my favourites, but I don’t think he is right about this effect of the Pirate Bay verdict:
All in all, thanks to today’s verdict – which I do hope would be overturned in higher courts – we should expect piracy to emerge as a full-fledged political issue, at least in Europe. This is no longer a debate about entertainment. As of today, it’s a debate about digital liberties. I think that the record industry does not fully grasp the level of political resistance it’s going to face from the young people in Europe and elsewhere. They remain ignorant at their peril.
I don’t see the resistance to and anger over the verdict turning into meaningful political action. Those defending “digital liberties” are unorganized, a very loose coalition without practical political experience. Of course, I hope I’m wrong…
Virginia Heffernan identifies a surprising effect of digital media on political rhetoric and style:
We tend to assume that the proliferation of digital media must be coarsening American speech and behavior. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. The threat posed by video parodists appears to have turned public figures watchful and cautious, like people who affect polite reserve in crowds for fear of being mocked or mugged. In the midst of so much digital chicanery, celebrity comportment may grow steadily more formal.
Hence, Barack Obama’s team floods the web with perfectly produced videos that are hard to parody. But is it really so devastating to be remixed? Does it matter that much?
Watch — the stunning results of Karen Strunks’ 4am Project. Many of the photos taken April 4 at 0400. (via Journalism.co.uk).
After almost five years of correcting and criticizing the Bild-Zeitung, and in the process becoming one of Germany’s most read blogs, Bildblog now announces a new policy: From now on the Bildbloggers will take on all German media.
Ideally there should be more media watchblogs of this kind, but I can see why they’re lacking. It takes a lot of time, effort and persistence to carry on such a demanding project for years. You can find some examples of what they’ve been doing in my previous posts about Bildblog.
The Altpapier column has been resurrected, so the hopeful rumours turned out to be true. The new host is the news site dnews.de, based on the concept behind a Dutch site, nu.nl. According to the Tagesspiegel, nu.nl has been successful by bringing short news stories for readers who want to inform themselves quickly about what’s going on… Wait: wasn’t that more or less the concept behind Nettavisen and Netzeitung circa 10-14 years ago? Anyway: a very warm welcome back to the newspaper-dissecters!
It pays off to be favourably noted by Undercurrent! We Tell Stories by Six to Start won the best in show award at SXSW Interactive. It’s well worth to have a look at the category winners as well. (Via BBC News).
You are currently browsing the archives for the Undercurrent in English category.
www.flickr.com
|
