Journalists arrested in St. Paul

You've probably heard about journalists being arrested in repressive nations like China. No big surprise, right? But what would you say if I told you it's happening in the United States of America too?

Find that hard to believe? Think things like that don't happen here? Then watch the video. You'll see Amy Goodman, an award-winning journalist, being arrested by St. Paul police as she was covering a protest outside the Republican National Convention on Monday.

Even though she was clearly identified as a journalist, Goodman was charged with "obstruction of a legal process and interference with a 'peace officer.'" Two of her producers were arrested for "suspicion of felony riot." Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now," a daily radio/TV program that airs on more than 700 stations nationwide.

A more honest charge would have been "covering news stories we don't want the public to see."



During the weeklong Republican National Convention, St. Paul police arrested and jailed 19 media workers, in addition to more than 800 protesters. Police used teargas and flash grenades against protesters.

So much for the First Amendment which, in case you need a refresher, reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

You can read Amy Goodman's account of her arrest here.

Keywords: First Amendment, media, journalism, RNC, MSM, Democracy Now, Amy Goodman

Media matters

Yes, the media does matter. And so does the truth.

It was good to see a major media outlet like ABC News fact-checking aspiring VP Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention last night. As this ABC news article notes, Palin's speech "bent the truth on her record and on the opposition."

Not surprisingly, she left out the part about her remarkable skill at bringing home millions of "earmarked" federal dollars (our tax dollars at work!) to her community, and her support for the $398 million "bridge to nowhere." So much for being a "reformer."

Continuing his record of our-reporting most of the MSM, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show used Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly's own words about candidate Palin to demonstrate their hypocrisy in defending her. Palin gets to demonstrate a fine veneer of hypocrisy too.



On a related front, the organization Media Matters for America has 'deconstructed' and charted the Republican smear campaign against Obama, calling it "Swiftboating 2.0" both for its resemblance to the 2004 smear campaign against John Kerry and for their use of web 2.0 techniques to spread the smears.

Media Matters notes:

Just as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth unleashed on the public a dossier of lies about John Kerry in 2004, this new campaign is on a mission to spread misinformation about a presidential candidate.

We call it "Swiftboating 2.0" not only because it is the latest model of a political smear campaign, but also because it shares features of "Web 2.0" sites like Facebook and MySpace: significant portions of the content are generated by ordinary people and are spread from peer to peer. Swiftboating 2.0 combines these new information pathways with traditional media -- books from conservative publishers, right-wing radio, and conservative pundits and strategists on television -- to spread the smears as widely as possible and force them into the mainstream media.

If you don't want to see America get suckered again, don't help spread the lies...instead, spread the word.

If a tree falls...

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

And if a story lands on the front page of the New York Times, but other reporters and news organizations ignore it, does it still count? That's the question asked in this From the Frontline blog post, What No Inquiry?

I've been asking myself the same question. After all, in the past month we've heard some startling news.

• We found out that the Bush administration had enlisted a group of retired generals to shill the Iraq War for them all these years...without disclosing their "special relationship," of course. (See Behind TV Analysts, See Pentagon's Hidden Hand, NYT, 4/20/08. Also see this 2003 NYT story, which foreshadows the larger story.)
  
• We found out that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Powell and Ashcroft sat around on multiple occasions discussing exactly how to torture detainees. And that our dear president approves of their decisions. (See Cheney, Others OK'd Harsh Interrogations, ABC News, 4/11/08)
  
• We learned that military justice apparently is an oxymoron, as the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay told how he was pressured to convict someone...anyone...because it wouldn't look good to admit that most of those being held and tortured all these years were innocent. (See Guantanamo Prosecutor Says Why He Quit, Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/4/08, and Former Guantanamo prosecutor says trials tainted, Reuters, 4/28/08)
  

Real news...all buried under a barrage of "horse race" campaign coverage, speculation about Reverend Wright, and heavy breathing over the Texas polygamy raid.

Ah, yes, the mainstream media has so many more important things to do.

Can we solve it?

You know, maybe we can.

If polar opposites like Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich can actually sit knee to knee on small sofa and agree that we must take action to address climate change...well, maybe there's a glimmer of hope. Maybe we will come to our senses and take action before we destroy the planet.

To view the ad, just click on the pic.

The ad is part of the We Can Solve It campaign, a project of The Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit, nonpartisan effort founded by former Vice President Al Gore. The goal is to educate people that the climate crisis is "both urgent and solvable."

I'm hoping they're right.

Already the naysayers are piling on, bitching and moaning and calling them hypocrites in blog posts, comments and the like.

But I prefer to take a "the glass is half full" approach to life. I'd rather applaud them for doing what's right and trying to make a difference...in spite of their political differences. That's what we all need to do if we want to pass on a livable planet to the next generation.

Journalism: Form or content?

As I was standing at the head of a classroom yesterday, watching Michael Wesch's Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us for the umpteenth time, I had a minor epiphany.

It was about halfway through, when you see on the screen [Title] does not define the form. It defines the content.










And I thought, you know, it's the same with journalists. It's what you do that makes you a journalist, not who you work for, or where your work is published or broadcast, or how it's distributed.

I'd just been talking about this very issue with my colleague Steve Sloan, a fellow blogger and my co-presenter at yesterday's JACC Norcal conference at SJSU (that's him at left). The night before, we'd both heard veteran broadcaster Sam Donaldson "diss" bloggers as he spoke at the RTVJ 50th Anniversary Reunion dinner.

Blogging is just opinion, Donaldson said, and without editors, how do you know if it's fact or fiction?

But when Donaldson offered his definition of a journalist, he didn't say anything about editors. He said, "We try to present our readers, our viewers, with things we believe to be true." Sometimes you make mistakes, he added, but if you do you correct them.

I didn't hear anything in that definition that would preclude a blogger from being a journalist, Sloan said.

And some of the mainstream media aren't exactly doing a great job of reporting the truth these days, I added. Does this mean they're not really journalists?

So in the middle of our JACC presentation on Podcasting, Blogging and New Journalism, as I listened once again to the Web 2.0 video, it hit me: [Journalism] does not define the form, it defines the content. It's what you do, not who you work for.

Links:

• My JMC blog post on Sam Donaldson's Oct. 12 presentations to JMC students and the RTVJ reunion dinner guests
• Steve Sloan's Technology & Mass Communications powerpoint, posted on his SJSU Tech on a Mission blog
• Michael Wesch's Digital Ethnography blog

The dreaded "L" word

Someone finally said it. Someone in the news media...on air, and for the record.

Yes, it's the dreaded "L" word...and perhaps not the one you think. Not liberal, not lesbian. LIE. LIAR.

"We are surrounded by people who lie to us," said Daniel Schorr, NPR senior news analyst, in his Week in Review on NPR this morning.

And then he pointed to President Bush, who keeps saying that Americans don't torture people, even as his recently revealed memos make it clear that we do...to Blackwater, whose representatives keep saying they don't kill Iraqi civilians, even as recent news reports and congressional reports make it clear that they do...and to Olympic gold-medal winner Marion Jones who recently confessed that she lied when she insisted -- repeatedly and publicly -- that she had not used steroids to win.

After years of beating around the bush, it's about time people in the media started telling it to us straight, instead of using "give-'em-a-pass" euphemisms like "misspoke." After all, a lie is a lie is a lie. And those who tell them are liars. Even when that person happens to be the president.

News junkie riddle of the day

Q. How can you tell when your newspaper of record has lost its way?
A. When it thinks it's a quiz-style game show.

Word to the wise #1: Newspapers work better when games like this stay in the Arts & Entertainment section.

Word to the wise #2: It's best to avoid the irony of a "soldier's death" headline underpinning a cutesy game on what's supposed to be the front page.

Word to the wise #3: Games like this work better when the illustration doesn't give away the answer.

Podtech CEO's predictions for PR

"The press room of the future is going to be driven by broadband."

That's one hint about the future of public relations from a guy who ought to know...because he's one of the folks who's changing it.

John Furrier, CEO of PodTech.net, spoke last night about the future of PR and press rooms to a group of about 50 PR professionals and other interested folks at the Third Thursday social media meet-up in Palo Alto. The discussion was moderated by Giovanni Rodriguez, principal of HubbubPR.

Third Thursday focuses on the use of social media in marketing and PR.

Furrier started out as a tech guy, not a PR guy, and he didn't intend to change PR. He just wanted access to a decent press room at the big Consumer Electronics Show (CES), a space where he could quickly upload his podcasts and videos.

Hey, it's timely info, and people are interested...so why would you want to wait until you got home (or could find a local Starbucks with a good wifi connection) to publish it? News ought to get out fast!

So in January, for this year's CES, Furrier decided to create his own press room...a couple of rooms actually, at the Bellagio...with wireless, of course, mega broadband access, plus some plasma screens... and food, lots of it, because he noticed the food at the official CES press room tended to run out fast. He called it the Bloghaus. It was open all three days of the CED, 24/7.

CES opened its traditional press room to bloggers this year, but...it was crowded, the food ran out and the wifi crashed. So a funny thing happened...a lot of the bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers started hearing about this swell place over at the Bellagio and migrated to the Bloghaus.

Soon, Furrier had a full house. And the Bloghaus was operating more like a studio than a traditional pressroom, with bloggers and video bloggers conducting interviews and uploading them right away. By the end of the three-day show, 750 video clips on CES had been uploaded from the Bloghaus.

Even some mainstream media (MSM) folks showed up to check it out, like Stephen Levy of Newsweek and John Markoff of the New York Times. A few savvy CEOs showed up too, and gained some street cred for being willing to talk to bloggers one-on-one. Maybe they'd figured out this was a way to reach millions of people within a few hours.

One thing Furrier noticed is that bloggers and video bloggers tend to work a little differently from mainstream media (MSM) reporters...they talk to each other more, they collaborate. He described it as "conversations among influencers who form opinions."

"It dawned on me that this is the press club of the future," Furrier said. "I think you're going to see more of this...we are in the early stages of a transformation."

What's changing is the relationship between traditional and emerging media, he said. It's getting more symbiotic. MSM reporters are recognizing that bloggers can simply get a lot of information out faster. Also, they're recognizing that communities of bloggers who focus on specific issues can uncover good stories...and help them percolate up into public awareness. Then, as Furrier put it, "the mainstream media comes in and fossilizes the story for the public."

Coming up next in my next post: Furrier on the death...and rebirth...of the VNR.

To Iraq and back...the Woodruff report

If, like me, you missed last night's special report by ABC News Correspondent Bob Woodruff, To Iraq and Back: Bob Woodruff Reports, you can still catch it online.

In an email to JMC faculty, Prof. Bob Rucker calls it "a truly remarkable and moving special report."

He continued, "This is absolutely GREAT television reporting...definitely EMMY Award caliber. It is also very very emotional TV. It's difficult not to tear up and cry when you see what Woodruff and some Iraqi war veterans went through, and now face as life-long battles for survival."

To watch the video, go to http://abcnews.go.com/ and click on Bob Woodruff links on the main page, or click on this direct link: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2909190.

Can bloggers be journalists? PR pros think so.

Remember the recent dust-up over the bloggers hired by the John Edwards campaign? In Salon.com, blogger Lindsay Beyerstein explains "Why I refused to blog for Edwards."

The upshot? Her gut feeling was that any liberal blogger who joined the Edwards campaign would face a full-bore attack by right-wing bloggers and conservative groups...and she didn't want to become that kind of target.

And that's exactly what came to pass after Amanda Marcotte, a well-known feminist blogger, joined the Edwards campaign. Right-wing bloggers combed through her Pandagon blog and attacked some of her more provocative posts. Others joined in, and soon it was pig-pile time. Marcotte eventually resigned.

A better model for political blogging, Beyerstein said, is the 2006 Jim Webb Senate campaign, which put two bloggers on its payroll. These bloggers, Josh Chernila and Lowell Feld from Raising Kaine, are the guys who captured the "macaca" moment...and knew what to do with it. Beyerstein explains:

When Webb's videographer captured George Allen's "'macaca' moment"...all the campaign had to do was upload the video to YouTube and send out some well-targeted e-mails to bloggers and other supporters and wait.

Supporters forwarded the clip to their friends. Bloggers started posting the video on their sites. The "macaca" clip got more than 600,000 views on YouTube alone and exploded into the mainstream media.

The lesson for progressives, Beyerstein says, "is how effective bloggers can be when they're outside the campaign." She concludes:

"I think the candidates who benefit the most from the netroots are the ones who can inspire bloggers to do their work for free.... Every campaign needs a blog, but the most important part of a candidate's netroots operation is the disciplined political operatives who can quietly build relationships with bloggers outside the campaign. And the bomb-throwing surrogates need to be outside, where they can make full use of their gifts without saddling a campaign with their personal political baggage."

What I find interesting is that while academics and journalists waste time debating whether or not bloggers ever can be "real" journalists, PR professionals have decided. They are dealing with influential bloggers the same way they deal with influential reporters...by sending them information and trying to build relationships.

"Campaigns 'work' bloggers more or less the same way they work the mainstream press," Beyerstein says. "They send out e-mails and press releases. They make phone calls. They make their candidate available for interviews. They invite bloggers to campaign events. They network in person at Drinking Liberally or the YearlyKos convention."

Sounds like dealing with the media to me.

Convergence and conferences

I noticed an odd item in the latest Convergence Newsletter...a list of upcoming conferences that included the following:

Creating Communication: Content, Control and Critique
57th Annual Conference of the International Communication Assn.
San Francisco, CA, May 24-28, 2007
http://www.icahdq.org/conferences/index.asp

It struck me that anyone who still thinks it's possible to "control" content hasn't been paying attention to current trends in the media. I clicked on the link to check it out...and here's what came up in my browser window:

Obviously, the ICA conference web site has a few problems. The red and black color scheme is just lurid, and it appears that the graphics aren't showing. Worse, clicking on a link opens up the page in a new window...but there's no "back" button or link to take you back to the original page.

This may work in browsers like Explorer, where you just pile up open browser windows, but for browsers like Firefox with tabbed browsing, it's really dysfunctional.

Overall, I don't get the impression it's a forward-looking organization.

The ICA conference does list keynotes on the significance of social media and the democratic potential of blogging, so maybe it's more tuned in than the web site suggests. We'll hope so...otherwise, it looks like a bust. And that's too bad because it's practically in my backyard.

A little further afield but more promising is the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) conference in Las Vegas this April 18-21. With sessions like "Journalism Values in a Multimedia World" and "The Future of News" -- a session reporting on a new study of the public and TV news directors on the future of news, new technology and business -- it appears to be more on target.

If I was gonna pick one, I'd bet on the BEA.

Viral marketing

I was browsing through the latest San Jose area meet-ups list when I found one for the SF Advertising 2.0 meet-up next Tuesday.

The topic of the meeting will be viral marketing, and the group's meet-up page has links to some fun examples. Here are my favorites: Monk-e-mail and Waitin' Woes. Oh, and the Mentos video contest winners site.

So much fun stuff, so little time.

Reporting 2.0?

In Chron 2.0, an article posted last week on sfweekly.com, JMC lecturer Michael Stoll takes an in-depth look at the life and times of the San Francisco Chronicle. Overall, his article offers another fairly dismal view of the future of newspapers and journalism, pointing to continuing decreases in readership and increasing competition for ad revenues from the likes of craigslist.com.

But, as Stoll points out, at least the Chronicle is still hiring...unlike the Mercury News, which is about to slash its news staff again. As reported on the eastbayexpress.com blog:

Merc managers plan to lay off 40 editorial staffers on Monday night and Tuesday morning, along with another 61 workers in the newspaper’s other departments.... Management has remained tight-lipped...and the secrecy has put the 446 employees who received layoff-warning notices on edge. “It’s the largest layoff in Mercury News history – that I’m aware of,” said Luther Jackson, executive director of the San Jose Newspaper Guild.

Aspiring young journalists may want to take note of what the Chron is looking for in its reporters these days. Near the end of his article, Stoll notes that prospective Chron reporters are being asked to explain how they would make blogging, podcasting, and video a part of their news routines. Stoll also quotes Narda Zacchino, the paper's deputy managing editor, who says, "I think we think of ourselves not just as a newspaper anymore, but as a multimedia provider, not just in print but on the Web."

In the olden days, people used to tell ambitious youngsters, "Go West, young man, go West. Now I think it should be: "Go Web, youngster, go Web."

Still Spanning the Globe

I stumbled upon the end of an era this morning...the last "Spanning the Globe" segment by sportscaster Len Berman on the Today Show (at least that's what I thought...see note at end of this post).

When I was in college, I used to love watching Len Berman, who covered sports at WBZ-TV in Boston in the 1970s. I think that's when he started putting together his wacky "Spanning the Globe" sports clips. He later moved on to NBC...and I moved on to take my first reporting job in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest. It was a long way from home, and I was delighted to stumble across Berman and his "Spanning the Globe" sports report on a local NBC affiliate.

It's hard to believe now, but I was a bit of a sports fan when I was a kid. My Dad was an avid Boston Red Sox fan, and I remember Carl Yastrzemski, "the man we call Yaz" (yes, I can still sing it!), and the "impossible dream" summer of 1967, when the Red Sox came this close to winning the American League pennant. One of the things I'm truly grateful for is that my father lived long enough to see the Sox finally win the 2004 World Series.

For my Mom, it was the Boston Celtics. I remember the golden era of Coach Red Auerbach and legendary players like Larry Bird. When my Mom was in her 50s, she took her first cross-country road trip -- and one of the highlights for her was passing through the town of French Lick, Ind., the birthplace of Larry Bird.

Since then, sports have become so much harder edged and more commercial. Now I rarely pay attention to it, or miss it...except when a marker comes along like Berman's last "Spanning the Globe."

Note: Imagine my surprise at finding an email from Len Berman in my in-box this evening. He wrote:

Hi Cynthia......hopefully you'll be happy to hear that Al Roker was
just kidding this morning. "Spanning the World" is alive and well and
will next air on the Today Show December 13th.
Best regards,
Len Berman

How cool is that!