ACLU Explains Why It's Fighting To Protect Info On Anonymous Vegas Newspaper Commenters

from the you-should-be-able-to-criticize-the-gov't dept

We recently wrote about the fishing expedition US prosecutors went on trying to get all sorts of info (much of which didn't exist) on anonymous commenters on an article by the Las Vegas Journal-Review. The newspaper fought (publicly) the request as being way too broad, leading the feds to back down and greatly narrow the request to just info on four commenters. The newspaper appears to have no issue giving up that information, but the ACLU is still protesting, claiming that one should be able to anonymously criticize the government without having US Prosecutors track you down. Specifically, the ACLU notes that the US Attorneys are really stretching things to call the comments in question "threats" to the US Prosecutor involved in the lawsuit the article was about. It does seem clear that the comments weren't meant seriously. It sounds like people who disagree with the result of the case venting in the same way people vent on pretty much any forum online. That said, I would agree with the ACLU if the newspaper were being compelled to hand over the info. But if it voluntarily is handing over the info after being asked, then I'm not sure it's an issue for the ACLU to get involved in, because the decision is the newspaper's to make.

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Newsday Decides To Charge For Online News...

from the good-luck-with-that dept

I grew up reading Newsday, a newspaper covering some of New York City and its suburbs. In fact, when I was 11 years old, that was my first job: delivering Newsday to neighborhood homes. When various newspapers first started to go online, I tried to visit Newsday pretty often, but it put up an annoying registration wall early on, and I found plenty of other, better sources of news. The quality of reporting in Newsday already paled in comparison to many other newspapers, so it just wasn't worth the hassle -- even once it removed the registration wall. I almost never visit the website any more -- though, occasionally I check the sports pages there. Last year, Cablevision bought Newsday, and today, along with announcing it was writing down a huge chunk of that purchase, said that it's going to start charging for access to Newsday online, making it that much less likely that anyone will care enough to visit Newsday's website. The major area news is much better covered by the other newspapers, and various "hyperlocal" websites are popping up all over the place to cover the local specifics. Deciding to charge for Newsday online is basically a death sentence for the paper.

By the way, if you want more evidence of how badly Newsday is at handling the relevant news: at the time I'm writing this, you can't find news of this pretty big change on Newsday's site at all. Instead, I'm relying on a Reuters report. That tells you pretty much all you need to know about Newsday's ability to keep its website relevant. Why pay for worse news when others give you a better product for free?

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Swedish Newspaper Has Tremendous Success 'Beta Testing' Article On The Pirate Bay

from the good-for-them dept

Last week, in talking about how the Wall Street Journal had laid off its librarians, I suggested that newspapers could start trying a more "open research" system where they ask their community to help them with the research. To be honest, I was cheating a bit in writing that -- as I already knew of a newspaper testing exactly that concept. However, I wanted to see the responses from people before pointing that example out. And, of course, I got some angry responses (especially from librarians, actually). I tried to make it clear that I know librarians are quite good at what they do, and aren't easily "replaced" by crowdsourced research -- but that if you are getting rid of librarians, why not use a more open approach to getting research done?

So... on to the experiment where that's actually happening. Swedish news organization Sydsvenskan was working on a feature piece for this past weekend all about what's happening to journalism -- from the economics to the technology to the culture. But, last week, a few days before the article was set to run, the folks writing it uploaded a "beta" draft version to The Pirate Bay and asked anyone who wanted to look at it, to check it out. And check it out they did. They provided a bunch of additional info, including some corrections -- and ideas for future pieces. In other words, it was a huge success in using the community to help do the research, even on such a controversial topic. The writers admitted that some got upset at the experiment (especially the idea that they might be "legitimizing" The Pirate Bay on the eve of the trial), but that, as an experiment, the project seemed quite worthwhile.

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Belgian Newspaper Lets Readers Into Editorial Meetings On Financial Crisis

from the connecting-with-your-community dept

Earlier this year, I wrote about how too many newspapers thought that adding "community" just meant putting comments on stories. That's not really engaging the community, though. While we've seen a few examples of newspapers doing a better job of really engaging communities, this new story out of Belgium may be one of the best examples so far. A reporter for a newspaper there, De Tijd, had been experimenting with some live blogging solutions, and decided to basically liveblog an editorial meeting where the paper decided how to cover a developing chapter in the financial crisis. While some others in the editorial meeting were nervous about "opening up" their editorial process, it actually was quite useful.

The wider community contributed plenty of useful feedback both on what they hoped the newspaper would cover (which was different than what the editors originally planned to cover), but also in providing more details about what was really important. It gave the journalists there much more insight into the real story, rather than the usual shallow coverage that often comes out of newspaper reporting on a sudden crisis (for example, recognizing that interbank lending -- or the lack thereof -- was a much bigger story than a collapsing stock market). It became truly interactive, with various journalists bouncing ideas off of the community and getting a lot of real time feedback to create a much better product.

Even more interesting was that after the reporter shut down the live chat, many in the group simply organized themselves into an IRC chat room and continued the conversation themselves. It's a fascinating story of how a newspaper embraced an actual community, rather than simply thinking that community was something you add on as a module at the end of the "real journalism."

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EMI Brings Newspaper Free Music Giveaway To The US

from the but-what-will-retailers-think... dept

You may recall last summer that Prince made some news by giving away his latest CD to every subscriber to a UK newspaper. The newspaper paid Prince for the promotion, suggesting interesting new business models that could help two industries at once: both the newspaper industry and the recording industry should benefit from such deals. The newspaper pays some money to the musician, but does so in order to get the promotional benefit -- making both sides better off. Of course, music retailers were upset, threatening to boycott Prince, but that seems like a fairly minor concern. The success of the promotion appears to have gotten the attention of at least one of the major record labels. EMI, who is under new management and seems to recognize how it needs to change, is doing a deal with the NY Daily News to give subscribers access to three free downloads. There will be an access code in the paper, and if you punch it in to the Daily News' website, you'll get to pick from a large list of songs (including at least one unreleased track). Again, this seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy, helping two separate industries in one shot -- though, again, it's likely that music retailers aren't going to be thrilled.

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People Still Get Their News From Local Newspapers And TV Stations?

from the massive-overreaction dept

I don't understand why people get so worked up about the FCC's various proposals to tweak the rules regarding how many TV stations and newspapers one company can own. The ownership of local newspapers and TV stations was important in the 20th century, when people only had a handful of choices on where to get their news. Local newspaper and broadcast television stations are becoming one small corner of a vastly larger media universe that includes dozens of cable television stations, thousands of news sites, and millions of blogs and podcasts. Nowadays, the real question isn't whether local newspapers and TV stations have too much influence; the question is whether anyone would notice if they disappeared.

Which brings us to FCC chairman Kevin Martin's New York Times op-ed defending his remarkably timid proposal to allow a newspaper in one of the 20 largest cities to purchase a TV or radio station—but not one of the metro area's four largest TV stations. Under his proposal, none of the FCC's other media ownership rules would be changed. In other words, a newspaper would be allowed to buy an also-ran TV station in a cacophonous media market like New York or LA, but the vast majority of cities would see no changes at all. Yet some members of Congress seem to think that even those miniscule changes are too much and have introduced legislation to require the FCC to spend even more time debating the issue, even though, as James Gattuso points out, that the FCC has been debating the issue for 11 years already. On the other hand, as ridiculous as the situation is, it's hard to have too much sympathy for the broadcasters. After all, they were happy to raise bogus fears of media concentration to stop the XM/Sirius merger this spring. Now the broadcasters are getting a taste of their own medicine.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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