Final Memo

I think that there are two projects that really excite me.  The first project is "Manual Focus."  I don't know anything about photography but I think this website seems to be meeting a real niche need for photographers and I'm surprised something like this doesn't already exist. I want to encourage her to develop an app, because I think it could turn into a kind of go-to app for those learning the skill.

The second website I want to express support for is the website about police brutality.  I think it has a lot of potential, and I think it is an important site to have up and running. Police brutality is a real problem in this country and around the world and I think there is desperate need for something like this to help expose and fight this problem. 

NPR bias

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) released a study that I recently read indicating serious issues with NPR's news coverage. I will go through some of their findings in this post.

The first thing that struck me, although it was not suprising, was the fact that Male sources outnumbered women by more than 4-to-1 (82 percent to 18 percent). 

The second thing that hit me was that 72 percent of U.S. guests were white males, while just 6 percent were women of color.

People of color made up only 15 percent of U.S. sources.

Finally, Republicans outnumbered Democrats on the NewsHour by 2-to-1

Now like I said, these things were not surprising, but knowing these are true after empirical studies is stunning.  One response may be that racial and gender issues are being covered by white male republicans that make up the bulk of NPR; NPR doesn't need black guests or hosts to cver black issues...

In class we were shown evidence that similar journalistic issues were present aroun environmentalism.  During the rare moments when the environment was discussed, it wasn't done by experts.

If this is the case, NPR is conceding that it is seriously dropping the ball in terms of getting experts on their shows.

It seems like common sense that if you are going to be talking about gender issues, you'll want women as a part of the discussion (though obviously there are male experts/scholars of gender issues).  In the same way, you'll want environmental science experts when you're talkng about environmental science issues.

In my view, this FAIR study shows one of two things.

Most likely, NPR is biased against these moe lefty issues, and that's why they aren't touched upon.

Or less likely, NPR is just poor quality in terms of getting expert, knwledged voices on the air.

Independent media startups

After reading this article I think I have a new perspective on prospective jobs and startups in independent media.

I want to run through a couple of hurdles and considerations that the article made me think about before I pitch an indy.

1. Competition. In a market, there's always going to be competitors that will be trying to do what you do but better. The article was essentially arguing that there are NO niches.  You're only hope is to do something nichey and do it better.

2. Simplicity. In the words of Thoreau: "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity."  The article says, "You can never be short and clear enough in your elevator pitch."  I take this to say that pitches are not only elevator pitches. Everytime a new or prospective audience member, viewer, listener hears about your project – that's an opportunity for a simple, concise speech. The website must be simple, clear, and concise, like an elevator pitch. Even if your niche or idea is complex, it has to be able to be conveyed in simple, bite-sized terms because of the plain fact that people's curiosity is ephemeral, and you may only have their attention piqued for a few seconds before they're gone forever and with it your hopes of popularity.

3. Marketing. If you're going to stay alive you need a crowd, and you need to crowdsource that crowd.  There are many ways to do this but it's critical to have a plan.  Without a marketing plan you're just sitting and wishing when competitors are chomping at the bit. 

Drudge - How does he do it?

How is it possible to maintain respect as a journalist when you self-admit that only 80 percent of what you report on is accurate? And other estimates are far lower. There is myriad media critique of Drudge, example. How does he get away with this? Why does his audience keep coming back.

 It's my view that if his major source of viewers wasn't coming from those looking for his aggregational services, he would be out of luck.  Most people visit his site because of his ability to collect breaking news, as quick as the quickest. Good lord it's marred by his reporting though. Scandal after scandal has discredited this man's work, and yet he stays afloat. I suppose it helps to be so well connected to those in the mainstream media. It's not uncommon for those journalists who could criticise Drudge end up sticking their necks out for him. Why? Power and influence. Even the independent media should be scared of criticising Drudge. For a small online periodical or blog to be linked by the Drudge Report could crash their servers. Such is the volume of traffic on Drudge's terribly designed website (another thing that baffles me as to why he's still in business.)

Solutions? Simple, forget about your journalistic goals and ambitions and be a journalist: speak truth to power. Sound unrealistic? My advice is to adopt the old anarchist saying, be realistic, demand the impossible.

Fowler and Clinton

Mayhill Fowler of Huffington Post released this article, and a scandal began. The story is summed up in the full audio. Tod Purdam from Vanity Fair released a "hackjob" of an article, which pained Clinton pretty poorly. In an effort to catch Clinton off-script, Fowler did two things, during the interview, that were journalistically touchy. She asked Clinton a question without identifying herself as a journalist (though she was apparently obviously holding a recording device). For context, she was in a rope line, a public place where Clinton was intended to shake hands, make short conversation etc.  Secondly, she asked him a very leading qustion, the intent must have been to elicit the exact kind of incriminating response that she got. The question was, "what did you think of that hackjob" referring to Purdam's article, which was highly critical of Clinton.

Her article explaining the one question interview was misleading. Take a look at the first paragraph of her article. It misrepresents the nature of the leading question.  She was acting questionably when she did two things unorthodoxically. Perhaps it would have been alright if she asked the leading question after identifying herself.  Perhaps she could have gotten away with remaining unidentified as a reporter, but asked a less leading question. Doing these two things at the same time was questionable. My opinion is that this article tries to make it seem like she caught Clinton off script, an insight into his real character. I don't think this is accurate. Clinton was very much on script. In a rope line, he is campaigning. Every comment, every handshake is intended on a vote. If one crazy in the line says something outlandish, he might not disagree simply for the sake of being personable.  This is essentially what happened with Fowler, she asked a leading question and it inevitably affected his answer.  The worst part of this scandal, and Fowler's journalism is that this doesn't come across in her feature. It's completely camouflaged.

I'm all in favor of exposing two-faced political hypocrisy, rope-line or no.  But Fowler could have and should have avoided breaking two journalistic norms at one.  If she didn't do that, she should have at least put the whole thing in context, something her article fails to do.

Transparancy vs. Objectivity

I recently read this blog post about the dialogue surrounding transparent and objective journalism. The author's view is that, given that bias is unavoidable, transparency of point of view is a superior mode of operation.

I'm not entirely certain that there is no such thing as bias. Listing off voting records something like VoteSmart may be unbiased, but then, perhaps this isn't journalism. Maybe it is data entry, which by itself can be partisan.

In any case, I descry a desperate need for transparency in journalism today.  I think every piece, whether it is an opinion piece or not should come with some form of ideological disclaimer. That said, to strive for objectivity is critical. As much as I am enamored by the move towards transparency, in no way should this replace the drive to be objective.

There must be a place in the middle wherein journalists strive towards objectivity, a virtually unreachable goal, but always accepts its failures. I would go so far as to say that anything less than this is dishonest.

Youtube - a lucrative mouthpiece

I read this article about youtube stars who came to find a following of other youtube goers, and they ended up making a living.  Michael Buckley is a self-made star who began his own youtube channel commenting on culture, and other topics of inters chosen by himself. He began posting youtube videos daily, roughly 40 hours a week for a year before he made any money at all.

Once he amassed a following, about 180,000, he was making roughly $20,000 every month.

His voice was primarily comedic, but there are many voices that have been brought to a larger audience because of Youtube.

Social activism, journalism, anonymous hactivism, and other critically important social voices have been brought to light because of the open format of youtube.

What I think is interesting about Youtube is that most contributors have virtually no intentions to make money from the site. They simply post content for the sake of content.  I view this as fundamentally different than a capitalist motivation for being a productive, creative being. Though it must be acknowledged that Youtube itself is clearly embedded within capitalism. Seen in this context, I think I can get away with calling posting on Youtube a revolutionary act.

censorship

After I read an article detailing the illegal censorship acts committed by major cell phone companies I was shocked, although I shouldn't have been. These kinds of acts have become increasingly commonplace, and it really is "shrivelling the first amendment." 

The details are as follows. Verizon has a legal and standard program to ensure that spam text messages are not sent out to users. NARAL is a text message service which gives information about abortions to those individuals who subscribed to it, this is legal and standard. What is not standard is that Verizon consciously sensored these messages, ensuring that they never reached the subscribers.  This was a highly risky maneuver done to harm the pro-choice movement, and stop the spread of information about abortions. This made me cringe. 

One can only imagine similar cases that are currently ongoing, which have yet to be disclosed. 

WIll Jacobson and "Legal Insurrection"

Today I spent some time listening to William Jacobson, the founder of Legal Insurrection.  He talked about the beginning and journey of his blog. The topic of this post will be to discuss how he deals with advertising, and his attitudes about it.

He generates a couple thousand dollars every month from his website. Most of this revenue comes from advertisements of various kinds. Except for a few deliberate promotions of Amazon, virtually none of the advertisements on this website are under his control.  They are chosen for him by algorithms with one ethic:profit.  They are specifically designed in various ways to select and show the ads that will pay the most at any given moment.

For me this raised ethical issues, but Jacobson is content with this modus operandi.  I didn't get a chance to ask him if there were any corporations that he didn't support. Perhaps he had issues about McDonalds' suggestion to its starving employees to "break food up into little pieces" to feel more full. Or perhaps he took issue, like I did, with Walmart's notoriously poor working conditions overseas.

The algorithms which select which companies to advertise for, and therefore support, don't take these moral issues into account. I wonder if Jacobson does.

Indy media is susceptible to cave to the donors?

For, Harry Browne of the Dublin Institute of Technology "both nonprofit news and commercial news often find themselves constrained by the hidden agendas of their masters. Just as commercially supported journalists often find themselves dispatched to investigate the owners' hobbyhorses, nonprofit newsers are frequently assigned to 'chase after the idiosyncratic whims of funders.'"Source

This was a troubling line and I'd like to take a moment to respond. It is not the case that independent media, by and large, will alter their content, especially their journalistic ethics or beliefs, in order to gain funding. My argument has to to with the order of the institution and the funding. 

In mainstream media, the funding made the station/outlet/paper possible.  Independent media often start out with no money at all, they begin as side-jobs, hobbies etc. They blossom once they realize there is significant support for what they are doing, and they can then rely on donations from those supporters for their livelihood. 

Furthermore, a donor need not shift and change and bargain with indy outlets to get them to publish material that the donor wants. The breadth of indy media is incredibly large, and virtually any donor can simply give to whichever outlet suits him or her. It's cheaper, smarter and more realistic to do this than try and change an established institution. 

In this way content drives funding/donations. In mainstream media, funding drives content. 

This is not to say that Indy media is not responsive to their audiences (Actually in some important ways they are on the cutting edge of interacting with their audience). They will spice up their websites, their formatting, improve, develop, and compete with other indy sites with similar angles to be the best etc.

Blogs and Money

     I just read Josh Marshall's keynote lecture at Ithaca College and it was striking for a number of reasons. The first point that was noteworthy was that TPM was basically an accident. Though his blog began in 2000, it really got going in early 2003, and at some point a friend of his suggest that he charge advertisers to be on his blog. By 2004 that was his primary revenue.  In the following years he had a staff and a wildly popular and innovate news site.
     Innovation was the next point that I want to highlight about TPM.  He began doing something called collaborative journalism which is when you ask your readers to not only view, but contribute to the discussion that your article, video, or image brings up.  Collaborative journalism is beneficial for a small blog in a few ways.
     Firstly, any mistakes that are made are quickly corrected–something that would be a near impossibility in print journalism.  Secondly, another advantage over print that TPM utilizes is the ability to make the readership feel like they have a functioning relationship with the paper. From a PR point of view, the best thing you can do is get your customer to identify with the brand.  In less perverted corporate terms, the readers feel like they are a part of a community doing something special – and they are.
     With a staff of roughly 6-10 individuals, and a monthly revenue of 45,000 dollars, TPM is a wild success in terms of the money it is making. This can have a couple of interesting effects on not only TPM, but other comparable blogs. With that much money, employees can be paid a living wage, not only that TPM can afford the best employees for the job.  Complimentarily, the content can improve due to the funding behind stories/reporting.
     I think one of the best points of his lecture was the comparison between independent media and mainstream media.  Whereas mainstream media are preoccupied with a conception of balance, independent media can prioritize around accuracy. He gives a number of examples were these two principles seem to be in conflict in ways that I had not thought about before.

Diversity in media

Ben Bagdikian, a leading scholar on the topic, has been studying corporate news ownership for decades. In his 1982 book, The Media Monopoly, he reported that 50 corporations owned half or more of the media business. By the early 1990s, that number was trimmed to 20, and is now well under 10. With such ownership comes bias, and news content now reflects a narrow "range of politics and social values from center to far right," Bagdikian writes, leaving the American audience with a press that covers "a narrowing range of ideas."

Breaking Through The Information Blockade 

Independent Media Centers revolutionize the online alternative press

by Gene Hyde

Media consolidation has become the dominant trend in mainstream media for the past half century. This quote illuminates one of the key disadvantages this poses for a democracy. Conglomeration means the political discourse is in the hands of the few. The mainstream media has become increasingly the bulletin board for a "narrowing range of ideas." 

I write because this is not the case for the entirety of America's media. In fact, independent media has done nothing if not diversify over the same time period.  If a range of ideas, diversity, dialogue, and honest/unabridged debate are what one is looking for – the place to go is the internet. The FCC does not regulate the internet like the radio waves. The web isn't as heavily regulated as CNN, MSNBC, or FOX. 

The question is or how much longer. Of course, there are those fighting for net neutrality, internet freedom, and media diversity, but will they succeed? It is difficult to say given such starkly different trends. On the one hand, independent media is growing stronger.  On the other, media consolidation is becoming ever more apparent and overwhelming. 

"The Internet is Dangerous for Democracy" – The Mexican Spring

This article posted in 2012 details a mexican protest surrounding two key issues at the time. The first is the President.  The second is Televisa - the massive Mexican media conglomerate.  The protestors were enraged due to the corruption of the media and the television "news" organizations favoring the President - a bias that was not coincidental. The President has been accused of paying off news organizations for favorable coverage.

One of the most important features of a healthy and functional democracy is a diverse, honest, and informative media. This was the simple demand of the "Mexican Spring" – a democratic protest if there ever was one. They had trouble spreading the word of their movement initially however. The very institutions they were protesting were also responsible for their fair and accurate coverage. Unsurprisingly, Televisa did not cover the democratic protests.

Here is the importance of  the internet. Lacking in mainstream coverage, the movement needed to rely on "alternative" means of mass communication. Through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other independent media the protests were able to get the word out considerably more effectively than if they were to rely on traditional media.

“The Internet is a danger for democracy,” these are the words of Jean-François Copé, the French politician. What can I say that will convey the depth of Copé's confusion, and the vital importance that the internet has on today's democracies?

An Unacceptable Business Model for Indy Media

Staying Alive came out in the American Journalism Review. The article talks about the struggles of old media to keep journalists, and steady revenue streams, and how new media has had a similarly difficult time financially. One of the differences is the adaptability of new media, and the fact that its costs can be extremely low relative to a large scale operation like the New York Times. The impetus for this post is regarding a comment made by Stephen Engelberg of ProPublica in "Staying Alive." He said that the ideal business model for ProPublica would be something, "like a very good museum. It charges people to come in and also raises good money."

I believe there is something deeply wrong with this model.  Journalism is a public service - a requirement for every voting member of a democracy to consume.  Information is not a privilege, it is a right. I am not ignorant of the financial realities confronting media of all types. New business models are required to meet the technological and social developments of our time. However, charging admission for journalism is not an acceptable business model. The cost to consume an organization's journalism would eliminate the readership of at least some of the poorest of this country, and the world. This would keep the poor ignorant, and therefore effectively disenfranchise significant portions of our voting population. What's more, this is the same population that is the most vulnerable to political outcomes.

Simply put, a cover charge for journalism keeps political information away from the individuals that most need it because they are the most affected by political goings on.

Whistleblowers and Watchdogs

I'm coming late to the game, but I want to comment on an article that came out on August 20, 2012 in The New York Times By Michael Moore and Oliver Stone: Wikileaks and Free Speech. The article sheds much needed light on the Julian Assange "Sex Scandal" revolving around allegations of sexual assault. Sweden has issued a warrant for his arrest, though he has not been formally charged of any crime. The article takes care to note that Dr. Assange has, on multiple occasions gone out of his way to encourage investigations in accordance with this allegation to clear his name. He has made it clear that he can cooperate from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, however the Swedish government has requested that he come to Sweden under arrest. Dr. Assange has expressed willingness to comply under the condition that Sweden pledges not to extradite him to the U.S. to be tried for criminal activity. Sweden has made no such pledge which leads Moore to argue that the entire point of the sex scandal was to get Assange to Sweden to get him to the States.

This was the impetus for this post. I would like to see where in the Constitution it says that the United States can legally try a citizen of another country for crimes that were committed outside of the United States. Moore highlights this point arguing that if the United States has the legal authority to conduct such a trial, what is to stop other world powers from legally trying whomever they feel is a criminal international. This, to me, is a perfect instance of the kind of American foreign policy reasoning that Jeremy Scahill has called, "A twisted logic - a logic without end."