This isn’t the first time that Ars has had such allegations leveled at it. As Cynthia Brumfield writes at IPDemocracy, an incident involving a link to one of her posts occurred back in 2006 and has even made it into the Wikipedia entry on Ars. In the comments on her latest post, Ars writer Nate Anderson takes issue with Cynthia’s characterization of events, however, saying it was a mistake that was corrected quickly and that she should have tried to contact someone at Ars before she flamed them in a post. In a response, Cynthia said that she had heard from many others who had had similar experiences.

In the interest of balance, I emailed Ars founder Ken Fisher to ask him for a comment on the allegations, and he said that in the case of IPDemocracy, it was a simple mistake in which “the link got removed accidentally in the editing phase,” that it was fixed as quickly as possible and that there was “no intent to deceive.” As for MG Siegler’s post, he said that Siegler wasn’t the only blog to make the comparison between the iPhone and the game of Risk (this blog also did) and that therefore he didn’t deserve a link. In any case, he said, Ars didn’t see Siegler’s post and wrote its own version at about the same time (the site said it was published later because editors were busy).

I emailed MG Siegler for a comment as well, and he said effectively the same thing as Fisher: that he didn’t link to the other blog with a similar post because he never saw it. However, he maintained that Ars must have seen his post and waited a few days before copying it, and said that the site has done similar things in the past. Since his post was published, he said that he gotten what he called “tons of emails” from other bloggers and writers who felt their work had been copied, and on his blog he said that “A LOT of… well respected and well placed people working in the industry out there have the exact same thoughts.”

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has come up, obviously. Louis Gray wrote a post about how Mashable was “stealing the B-list buzz” by not providing proper attribution to him (Pete Cashmore and other Mashable writers commented on the post), and later posted a follow-up here. In the past, Mashable put a small “via” link at the bottom of a post, without any other link or attribution (as Adam Ostrow notes in a comment, that policy has changed since Louis’s post). I don’t know what the best approach is, but I know that it’s becoming more of an issue, and it’s something that every blogger should be thinking about when they write. I wrote about this before after Louis posted his thoughts.

As I said in that earlier post, I think the bottom line is that you should link as much as possible — links are the life-blood of the web, and they are how people find new sources of information. In some cases, I will go back and link to other blogs that have written about something I posted on long after I wrote the post. I think that’s part of what blogs (and the media in general) are supposed to be about. It’s more than just Digg submissions and Techmeme headlines.

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In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone.

Obviously, 140-character messages don’t take the place of reported stories that check facts and determine what exactly happened, or pull together various reports into a coherent whole. But they are a compelling part of that story — and journalists who know how to take advantage can produce something much more complete with the help of all those Twitter reporters in the field. Journalism has been called “the first draft of history,” — and now the people putting together that draft have even more help in getting it right the first time.

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“In 2002, 86 percent of the revenue from I.D.G.’s publications came from print and 14 percent online. These days, 52 percent of the revenue is from online ads, while 48 percent is from the print side.”

That’s a remarkable shift. In some cases, magazines continue to be printed but come together primarily online, and in other cases — such as InfoWorld — the print magazine has been closed completely and the publication is solely online. And the business is better:

“Today, I.D.G. says, the InfoWorld Web site is generating ad revenue of $1.6 million a month with operating profit margins of 37 percent. A year earlier, when it had both print and online versions, InfoWorld had a slight operating loss on monthly revenue of $1.5 million.”

There is a dark lining to the silver cloud, however — the story says that IDG’s staff levels are 50-per-cent below where they were when the transformation started:

“By then, the editorial staff was down to its current level of 17 people, about half the number in 2002, and way below the peak of nearly 100 during the technology spending boom of the late 1990s.”

Still, a fascinating tale of one publisher that took the bull by the horns and made the change deliberately. As former editor Stewart Alsop says near the end of the piece: “What’s happening at I.D.G. is a fairly accurate map for every other publishing organization. Get over it, it’s going to happen.”

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“During the Virginia shootings, they found the emergency services were slow to update their reports on the latest situation and the names of those killed. Within just 90 minutes of the first deaths, however, a web page accurately describing the events appeared on Wikipedia.”

The study found that dyring the fires in California in October, web users on various websites and those using Twitter were keeping their friends and neighbours informed of their whereabouts and the location of the fires on a minute by minute basis, and were also posting links to Google Maps with which others could track the progress of the fire and mark areas where schools and businesses were shut down as a result of the threat. The media weren’t so useful, however:

“The mass media were unreliable… as they struggled to access remote areas from which website users with an internet connection could easily report. Media sites also focused on the ’sensational’, such as fires close to celebrities’ homes, which distorted the overall picture.”

Some interesting lessons there, for both emergency services and the media, about information delivery on the Web.

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I must admit, the part about the gin never really occurred to me (go ahead and read the speech — I’ll wait). But the rest of it is right on track. Particularly the part where he describes the four-year-old looking behind the TV for the mouse. I’ve spoken to a number of groups about social media, and I always use my three daughters as examples: the oldest uses Facebook more than she watches TV, the middle one loves interactive fiction-writing sites like Gaia Online, and with the youngest it’s Club Penguin and Webkinz. To them, the most interesting kinds of media are interactive media.

Not surprisingly, more than one commenter among the dozens who have responded on BoingBoing’s post about Shirky (since his blog doesn’t have comments) argues that the author is guilty of social-media triumphalism, and that he is merely stating a preference for time-wasting with Wikipedia or Lolcatz as opposed to TV. One commenter says that his speech is like saying “now that we have Oranges no sane person is going to eat Apples, and anyone who grows Apples doesn’t understand how f’n juicy and delicious Oranges are… what a bunch of twits! amiright?”

This point has some truth to it. For every person who thinks that World of Warcraft builds leadership skills and watching TV is one step above drooling and whittling, there is another who thinks that CSI is gripping drama, and anyone on WoW is a brain-damaged geek living in his mom’s basement. There are plenty of ways for human beings to zone out and get very little accomplished — just look at golf, for example (or poker). But Shirky’s point is still a good one, I think: namely, that social or interactive media, however lame or goofy, has an added quality that sitting in front of a box does not. I’ll go along with that.

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The founders say they want to find young or up-and-coming TV producers and filmmakers and in some cases to help them get major studio or network deals. The site already has a stable of more than 40 Web-based shows that it plans to run on networks such as YouTube, and has been conducting a kind of Web-based talent search with a contest that ends on April 28 — the winner, who will be chosen by a jury including David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Neil LaBute, will get as much as $3-million in financing to produce a movie for theatrical release.

That’s not the only contest Filmaka has been sponsoring either: the venture has also been running a sitcom competition with the cable channel FX, which will see the winner get $40,000 to shoot a 15 to 20-minute pilot for a potential FX television show, and the site has a documentary competition and a “branded entertainment” competition. Fox ran a similar kind of contest with MySpace, but didn’t turn either of the winners into a pilot. Jerry Zucker of NBC has spoken in the past about how expensive — and in many cases, ultimately futile — the current pilot-oriented TV production process can be.

More than 3,000 submissions have been received from aspiring filmmakers in more than 90 countries, and all of the submissions can be streamed from the Filmaka.com website. Visitors can choose to see entries by category (documentary, TV, feature etc.) or only the ones that have advanced to the jury level. Submissions include everything from animated shorts featuring “claymation”-style characters to sitcom-style comedies, and at least one Canadian filmmaker has several entries in different levels of the competition: Terry Miles has submitted a feature film called Lost and Found and also has an entry in the TV-pilot contest called The Secret Life of Amanda Jones, about a twentysomething college student who is also a vampire.

In an interview with Wired magazine, Grushow said that after 20 years in the network business, he wasn’t sure that any independent or unsigned filmmakers could produce content that he might be interested in, but he says his eyes were opened after Filmaka started the competition: “I was astonished at the quality level people were capable of creating … at such a low cost. To me, that represented a game-changer.” In Filmaka, he said, the partners hope create what amounts to “a studio with essentially no overhead.” And there’s already Canadian content.

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That’s ironic enough, of course – a show that’s all about how young people are turning to the Web and social media, but you can’t watch it online. The reasoning behind the decision is even more illuminating, however: in effect, the network is saying that the show has become too popular with fans online, and they would like to shift some of those eyeballs to the tube instead. Why? Because that’s where the advertisers are. Advertising on TV still brings in far more revenue per viewer than online, and CW needs to build up the former at the expense of the latter.

In reality, of course, the network may end up irritating the core group of viewers — many of whom enjoy the freedom of watching a stream online whenever they want — and the show could go down the drain regardless.

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I wanted to try and pull a few of those together because, well… that’s how I roll. Plus, it’s something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit, and writing about it helps me think. So bear with me (or not). If you look at some of the comments on my post about the Twitter ads story, as well as on other posts about it, you can see people talking about how it “wasn’t a story,” and suggesting — as Nate Westheimer did — that traditional media, with editors and so on, would never run something like that. I’d like Nate to read the New York Observer piece and see if he still feels the same way.

Would a newspaper or TV station or magazine have run with a Twitter story like TechCrunch did? Maybe not. But the fact is that plenty of poorly-sourced or single-sourced or anonymous-sourced stories show up in newspapers all the time — and not just the Enquirer or People magazine, but in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. And it’s not only stories about nuclear weapons in Iraq either — it’s stories that are about celebrities, or wealthy Wall Street types, or politicians. Sometimes, a story is just too good to pass up, even if it’s shaky.

That’s why it’s actually a good thing that news is becoming more of a process (which it always has been). Instead of trying to pump rumours and innuendo into full-fledged stories that deserve a premier spot in the paper, journalists can toss things into the ether when they think there is more to a story, and then update the story as it develops, something Mike Arrington said at mesh 2007 that he sometimes does. This is frequently messy, which is why I like to adapt the old saying about “if you love the law or sausages, don’t watch either one being made” to apply to the media. It’s not pretty, but it is occasionally true.

And that brings me back to the idea of “news.” What do we mean when we use that word, or when we say something like “if the news is that important, it will find me?” Some people responded to my post on that concept by saying they weren’t confident that “real” news would find them, by which I think they meant news of the U.S. election, or war in Sudan. But that’s only one small part of the definition of “news” — something that every person is probably going to define differently, and may even define differently depending on what day it is.

Is the Web to blame for creating “news” out of nowhere, as the New York Observer article suggests? I don’t think so. Newspapers have been doing that for about a hundred years. The Web is probably accelerating and amplifying that phenomenon — but at the same time, a proliferation of sources is also helping to nip such stories in the bud a lot sooner.

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As it turned out, a background image from Chinese Business Network blogger Christine Lu’s profile pic on Twitter popped up in a yellow box somehow, which made it look like an ad for the network, as she explained in a comment on the TechCrunch post. In other words, no story, right? Except that Duncan Riley of TechCrunch said in a subsequent comment that “ads are coming, it’s just a matter of when.” As more than one person has pointed out, however — including Frederic at The Last Podcast — this assertion comes without any real facts to back it up.

Nate Westheimer, a contributor to Silicon Alley Insider, also has a curious blog post in which he laments the state of blogging, which he says doesn’t pay enough attention to accuracy, and he uses Duncan’s post as an example. Which is fair enough, of course — except that Nate’s post is riddled with errors, including two different spellings of Duncan’s last name and a couple of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Fair enough, you might say — as Nate points out in a comment, he isn’t really a reporter. So is Duncan a reporter? Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn’t.

Duncan and I have had our differences in the past, but I’m not here to beat up on him for the Twitter story. Should he have run with it based on what turned out to be very little factual information? I don’t see why not — but I think it should have been updated later, as others have. Nate says that this shows “the importance of journalistic standards, especially that of using reliable sources and having a standard for truth.” I’m not going to argue with that — having editors is a great thing (mostly). But journalism is about speed as well. It’s a classic battle between going with the story because you’re out of time, and checking one more source or fact.

This isn’t something the blogosphere invented — wire services like Reuters and Associated Press have been operating this way for decades. Report something as quickly as possible, then fix the mistakes later. It’s when the mistakes don’t get fixed that we have something to worry about, and as Thord Daniel Hedengren reminds us, we could all probably do better at that — regardless of what we call ourselves.

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This is not really new, in the sense that Jeff and others (including yours truly) have been saying it for some time now. But it bears repeating, if only because some media entities are only now coming to realize just how much their business is changing. As a friend of mine who used to work at the Washington Post’s website has said often, there is a whole generation of editors who need to realize that we are moving from the “report, write, edit, publish” model to something more like a “report, write, edit, publish, edit, write, report, publish” model. It never stops.

Let’s be clear about something: I’m not saying that journalists — whatever their background, whether it’s mainstream media or blogging — should stop caring whether something is right, or should rush to publish something because someone else will fix their mistakes. And it’s true that expensive investigative reporting is almost always going to be the province of the established media. This isn’t some kind of blogosphere triumphalism thing I’m pushing here. But I think only an idiot would argue that journalism hasn’t changed, or that the industry can continue to do things the way it has done for centuries. It has, and it can’t.

There’s more in Jeff’s post than I have dealt with here, so I encourage you to go and read the whole thing. And if you just can’t get enough of people writing about the future of newspapers and the media online, Britannica has an ongoing debate about whether newspapers are doomed.

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